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

Life has always fascinated me less as a biological phenomenon than as a creative one. A seed does not merely survive; it unfolds. A melody is not manufactured; it emerges between people who listen deeply. A myth persists for centuries not because it remains unchanged, but because each generation discovers how to breathe through it.

Goethe described nature as perpetual metamorphosis. Henri Bergson wrote of an élan vital, a living impulse that exceeds mechanism. Hannah Arendt reminded us that every human birth introduces the possibility of something genuinely new into the world. Despite their differences, they all point toward the same mystery: life is not static, but it is continually taking form.

That mystery has become the central question of my practice. I do not make films, performances or installations to illustrate ideas. I create conditions in which something not yet fully known might emerge. My work is less concerned with representation than with manifestation: the fragile threshold where image becomes experience, performer becomes presence, technology becomes relation, and an audience briefly becomes more than a collection of spectators.

I first encountered this question through music. Growing up in a family jam band, I learned that rhythm cannot be imposed. You cannot force a groove into existence. Someone listens. Someone waits. A subtle pulse appears between bodies. The music seems to organise itself before anyone can claim authorship. That experience has remained the deepest foundation of my work. Creation is often less an act of invention than an act of attention.

In Symmetry, filmed inside CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, I became less interested in collision than in the invisible conditions from which form emerges. Sacred Environment explored whether technology could deepen, rather than replace, our embodied relationship with landscape. The Bird of a Thousand Voicesapproaches an ancient Armenian myth not as cultural heritage to preserve, but as a living organism capable of evolving through contemporary cinema, music and collective imagination. My work rarely asks what something means. It asks how something becomes alive.

In recent years I have become increasingly aware that much of contemporary culture rewards acceleration, certainty and continuous visibility. Yet nearly everything that matters most in human life resists these conditions. Trust develops slowly. Love cannot be optimised. Grief refuses efficiency. A meaningful artistic process often begins precisely where control reaches its limits. As the Tao Te Ching suggests, the deepest transformations often arise not through force but through an attunement to the dynamics already present within a situation.

The role of the artist resembles that of a gardener more than that of an engineer. One cannot command a flower to bloom, nor an actor to become truthful. One prepares the conditions. One removes what obstructs growth. One waits with disciplined attention. Emergence cannot be manufactured, yet it can be invited.

Ultimately, my work is driven by a simple question that continues to unfold through every medium I encounter: How does life find form? Everything else; myth, science, music, cinema, performance, technology, is a different language through which I continue exploring that same mystery.

–Ruben Van Leer