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, 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, a climate-focused spectacle broadcast to 180 million Eurovision viewers, and The Bird of a Thousand Voices, 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, a VR-opera with composer Kate Moore that won the Audience Award at Holland Festival, and The Boxer, 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, language and image.

Artist Statement

I began making music as a child in a family jam band, where I learned early that rhythm does not arrive through control. You listen, wait, and enter once a pulse begins to emerge between bodies. Meaning works in the same way. It cannot be forced into existence; it appears through sustained attention, resonance, and time.

My work approaches stories, myths, and histories not as narratives to decode, but as living structures that continue to transform through memory, technology, bodies, and collective experience. I am interested in the tension between transcendence and embodiment; between the human impulse to escape into abstraction, and the deeper challenge of fully inhabiting a body, a relationship, a breath, a life…

Across film, stage, music, and hybrid forms, I compose with presence. Breath, rhythm, voice, nervous systems, silence, light, and attention are primary materials in my practice. Technology is part of this ecology, but never the destination. I am less interested in virtuality itself than in what happens to human presence within systems of acceleration, optimization, projection, and continuous visibility.

In Symmetry, filmed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, I was less drawn to collision as spectacle than to the concentrated threshold that precedes visibility; the invisible moment in which disparate forces begin aligning toward form. That same fascination continues through works such as Sacred Environment and The Bird of a Thousand Voices, where myth is not retold from a distance, but activated as a living field of resonance between performers, landscapes, music, memory, and audience.

Again and again, my work returns to the same underlying question: how do we remain alive, embodied, and capable of intimacy in a world that continuously pulls us away from ourselves? Rather than offering fixed answers, I try to create conditions in which presence can emerge; where performance, image, and identity begin to crack open, and something more vulnerable, unguarded, and human becomes briefly perceptible.

I do not approach art as instruction or message delivery. I understand it as fidelity: staying with a body, a story, a contradiction, or a silence long enough for coherence to arise without coercion. In a culture driven by speed, self-curation, and prediction, my work seeks another tempo; one in which attention itself becomes the event, and the unknown is not extracted by force, but invited to arrive.

–Ruben Van Leer