Leo Villareal ’90

Leo Villareal is a Mexican American light artist based in New York City. His work explores not only the physical but adds the dimension of time combining both spatial and temporal resolution. The resulting forms move, change, interact and ultimately grow into complex organisms that are inspired by mathematician John Conway's work with cellular automata and the Game of Life.

Over the last twenty years, Villareal has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. His work is in the permanent collections of museums including The Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. In addition to being represented by Pace Gallery, Villareal also creates permanent, site-specific works which can be seen in cities around the globe. In 2013, Villareal inaugurated The Bay Lights, a monumental 1.8-mile installation of 25,000 white LED lights on San Francisco's Bay Bridge. In 2021, Villareal completed Illuminated River, which unites nine bridges in central London into a single, monumental work of public art.

Villareal was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and grew up in El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Chihuahua. He attended Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island and received his BA in sculpture from Yale University in 1990 and his master's degree in interactive telecommunications from New York University in 1994. After graduating from NYU, Villareal moved to San Francisco to work for three years at Paul Allen's private research lab, Interval Research, in Palo Alto. Since 2004, Villareal has served on the board of Ballroom Marfa in Marfa, Texas, a dynamic, contemporary cultural arts space. In 2011, Villareal proudly joined the board of the Burning Man Project. He currently lives in downtown Manhattan with his wife Yvonne Force Villareal and their two children.