Stephane Leonard (born 1979 in Berlin), lives and works in Brandenburg. Leonard studied Philosophy and Art History at the Humboldt University of Berlin and Fine Arts with an emphasis on Drawing, Film / Video, and Sound in the classes of Prof. Paco Knöller (master class) and Prof. Jean-François Guiton at the University of the Arts in Bremen.
Leonard is a co-founder of the Plastik Club collective in Bremen and of naivsuper, an artist collective, label, and publishing house based in Berlin. Since 2014 he has been a guest lecturer at the department for Industrial Design at the University of Applied Sciences for Engineering and Economics Berlin, where he teaches drawing and sound art.
In 2007 Leonard won the Video Art Price of the City of Bremen. This was followed by more awards at film festivals for his video works, residencies in Norway and Portugal, several exhibitions of his video and sound works, as well as drawings and paintings in Germany and abroad. He received exhibition stipends from the city of Berlin and a studio grant from the State Brandenburg in 2018.
In 2019 Stephane Leonard won the “Brandenburgischer Kunstpreis”, the Art Prize of Brandenburg.
Since 1995, Leonard has been active as an artist. First, as a street artist and later as a painter, a drawing, sound, and video artist.
In recent years, Leonard made a name for himself not only for his drawings but also as a director of internationally acclaimed music videos.
Stephane Leonard was born in East-Berlin in 1979. His father, an architect with an education from the art school in Berlin Weißensee, introduced him to the Bauhaus school at an early age. The interdisciplinary works of the Bauhaus artists have left a deep impression. After high school, he went on to study philosophy and art-history and later fine arts at the University of the Arts in Bremen, where his professor Paco Knöller, one of Germany’s most renowned drawings artists, encouraged him to go beyond just paper and canvas.
In 2002 besides studying drawing, painting, and print-making, Stephane got his hands on a video camera and started making films and videos. Taking advantage of the music department of the University of the Arts in Bremen, he was also able to sign up for electronic music composition classes, which has led to numerous of his own sound compositions and publications. Since then Stephane has won the video art price of the city of Bremen in 2007, became a director of internationally acclaimed music videos, has performed and published his sound works all over the world and shown his drawings and paintings in New York, Oslo, Vienna, Istanbul, Bangkok, Riga, Sydney, Kansas City, Hamburg, Berlin, and Porto…