Film premiere during the Milano Design Film Festival at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi, Italy.
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.
“Van Leer specializes in the refraction of the scientific through art.”
Filming Lukáš Timulak’s dance triggering data live in Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Filming pop-band Yeasayer inside science lab Naturalis, Leiden.
Infiltrating a regular working day at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
Artist Statement
“My earliest memories are of drumming in our family jam band. From silence a pulse would arise, and through listening, harmony would grow; a resonance the audience felt as we did as brothers and sisters. That sensation of shared emergence has never left me. It grounds my artistic practice: creating spaces where resonance appears between people, stories, and unseen forces shaping our lives.
My current work is about unraveling the scripts we inherit. Not to erase them, but to loosen their grip so memory can breathe and renew. Ancestral myths are living roots; when given space, they vibrate in the present, carrying us beyond fixed interpretation into fresh creativity. Through film, stage, and myth refracted by contemporary tools, I cultivate environments where vulnerability becomes a landscape of emergence. These tools are not only technological, but also the living intelligence of our biology and the geometries of sound and light that bind earth and cosmos—opening through embodiment into the unknown…
In Symmetry—a dance opera film shot at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider—colliding particles became a metaphor not for explanation, but for the shattering of familiar maps, making room for poetic forms to emerge. Later works, such as the VR-performance Sacred Environment and the music theater piece The Bird of a Thousand Voices, do not retell myths but reawaken them, so collective memory may breathe again.
Art does not liberate others; it liberates itself from fixations of concept, identity, and division. In that clearing, intimacy with the world can arise; organic, multidimensional, born through collaborative voices. Such art is not carved from intent, but appears in not-seeking, carrying a potency that cannot be forced.
In a time of 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, to the Self? And in that listening, remember humility, freedom, and our shared life force.“
–Ruben Van Leer
“[Film project] Symmetry is the perfect collision of science and art.”
Fusing choreographed data with CERN data.
Capturing soprano Claron McFadden and dancer Lukas Timulak on Uyuni’s salt flat, Bolivia.
60 meter under ground in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
“Ruben Van Leer’s pointillistic laser scan images [in VR] of Hunter Valley in Australia formed a stunning visual counterpart.”
Stage visuals The Black Eyed Peas - The Energy Never Dies tour USA & Europe.
Live VR performance Sacred Environment at The Concertgebouw, Amsterdam.
Realtime vocal-visual instrument with music band My Baby, Paradiso Amsterdam.