Ruben Van Leer is an award-winning filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work bridges cinema, music, theater, and technology to explore how myth, memory, and hidden forces shape human experience across time and culture.

His acclaimed sci-fi opera Symmetry (2015), the first project selected for the prestigious Arts at CERN Residency, was filmed inside the Large Hadron Collider. Exploring love, creation, and the building blocks of existence, the film won 11 international awards, including the Golden Prague for Best Performance Arts, and is available on AppleTV. Recent works include Power of Water (2021), a climate-focused spectacle broadcast to 180 million Eurovision viewers, and The Bird of a Thousand Voices (2024), a transmedia stage production inspired by Armenian folklore and created with pianist-composer Tigran Hamasyan. Blending myth, music, immersive scenography, and interactive gaming, the project explores themes of transformation, renewal, and coexistence.

Earlier works such as Sacred Environment (2017), a VR-opera with composer Kate Moore that won the Audience Award at Holland Festival, and The Boxer (2018), a hybrid opera-film for Dutch National Opera, illustrate Van Leer’s ability to dissolve boundaries between forms. His more recent Sound of Light (2023), created with Grammy-nominated saxophonist Ben Wendel, is an immersive performance probing the thresholds of human perception through sound, movement, and light. His projects have been featured at venues such as Teatro Grande Pompeii and Ballet National de Marseille, as well as on platforms like ARTE, HBO, and NOWNESS.

Van Leer studied filmmaking under Oscar nominee Jay Rosenblatt at the San Francisco Art Institute and holds advanced degrees from the Sandberg Institute and the Netherlands Film Academy. He has collaborated with visionaries including Peter Greenaway, Michel van der Aa, and Bill T. Jones, advancing the intersections of art, science, and consciousness.

As Artistic Director of Truth.io, Van Leer leads a platform for cross-media research that bridges myth, technology, and collective memory. The oeuvre embody a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk: collaborative works where resonance emerges through music, movement, and image.

Artist Statement

“I began making music as a child in a family jam band, learning that rhythm doesn’t arrive on command. You listen, wait, and enter once a pulse has arrived. Meaning works the same way. It cannot be forced into appearance; it emerges when attention is sustained for form to mature on its own terms.

My work approaches stories, myths, and histories as living structures rather than narratives to be decoded. They are not fixed messages from the past, but dynamic configurations that change when carried through time, bodies, and relationships. Memory does not reveal itself when extracted, but it becomes tangible when it is allowed to resonate, slowly, within a shared field of attention.

Across film, stage, and hybrid forms, I compose with embodiment. Breath, voice, nervous systems, sound, text, light, and silence are primary materials. Technology is part of this ecology, but never the destination. I am interested in how meaning passes through biological and relational thresholds; how it becomes livable, not just conceptual.

In Symmetry, filmed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, I was less drawn to collision as spectacle than to the concentration that precedes visibility. That moment of latency — where nothing has yet appeared, but everything is aligned — continues to inform works such as Sacred Environment and The Bird of a Thousand Voices. In these projects, myth is not retold from a distance, but activated through collaboration. The work does not explain myth; it creates conditions in which each participant can encounter directly.

I do not approach art as instruction or message delivery. I understand it as fidelity: staying with a body, a story, or a relationship long enough for coherence to form without coercion. In a culture driven by acceleration, optimization, and prediction, my work seeks another tempo; one in which attention itself becomes the event, and the unknown is not opened by force, but invited to arrive.“

–Ruben Van Leer