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

“As an eight-year-old in our family jam band, drumming began with listening, waiting until a pulse arrived and the group found its own sound through improvisation. That early experience still guides me: meaning can’t be dictated into visibility, but emerges when you stay in the moment long enough for form to mature.

My work treats stories, myths, and histories as living structures rather than puzzles to solve. They change under sustained attention. Memory doesn’t yield its truth when it is mined for conclusions; it becomes audible when it is carried through time, in the body, among others…

Across film, stage, and hybrid forms, I compose with resonance and embodiment. Technology is part of that palette, but never the destination; alongside breath, voice, nervous systems, sound, text, and light. I’m less interested in explaining the world than in building settings where unknown meaning can surface without being forced.

In Symmetry, filmed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, I was drawn not to collision as spectacle but to the concentration required before anything becomes visible at all. That attention to latency continues in my works such as Sacred Environment and The Bird of a Thousand Voices, where myth is not “retold” from a distance but activated through collaboration. The work doesn’t deliver a message about myth; it holds a space where each person can form their own relationship to it.

I don’t approach art as instruction. I understand it as fidelity: staying with a body, a story, or a relationship long enough for something truthful to take root. In a culture of acceleration and prediction, I seek another tempo - one where attention becomes the event, and the unknown is not opened by force but met through presence.“

–Ruben Van Leer