Ruben Van Leer is an award-winning filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work bridges cinema, music, theater, and digital 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

“My earliest memories are of making music at home, forming a live jam band with my family. From silence and chaos, a pulse would arise, and through listening something meaningful would grow—harmony the audience could feel as deeply as we did as brothers and sisters. That sensation of shared emergence has never left me. It has become the ground of my artistic practice: to create spaces where resonance can appear between people, stories, and the unseen forces shaping our lives.

My current work is about unlearning the scripts we’ve inherited. It is a practice of tracing the invisible pulse beneath the surface. Through film, stage, and myth refracted by high-tech, I cultivate experiential environments where vulnerability itself becomes a landscape of emergence.

High-tech, for me, does not only mean human-made electronic systems, but also evolutionary biological intelligence and the light-geometry that connects earth and cosmos through our embodied experience.

In Symmetry—a dance opera film shot at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider—colliding particles became a metaphor not for grand explanation, but for the dissolution of maps we habitually follow: an invitation to dwell in poetic resonance rather than scientific certainty. Later works, such as the live VR-performance Sacred Environment and the music theater piece The Bird of a Thousand Voices, do not seek to retell myths but to unravel them—presenting new threads where collective memory can breathe again, unprogrammed and re-inspired.

Art does not exist to liberate others; it can only liberate itself from inherited stories of identity, concept, and division. In that clearing, intimacy with the world can emerge—organic, multidimensional, born through collaborative voices. Such art is not carved from intent or narrative, but arises in not-seeking, carrying a potency that cannot be forced.

In a time defined by acceleration and fragmentation, my invitation is simple yet radical: can we stand inside the unknowable, unscripting ourselves to listen again—to earth, to cosmos, to harmony, to each other—and in that listening, remember humility, freedom, and our shared life force?”

–Ruben Van Leer