Leo Castañeda (b. Cali, Colombia 1988) is a fine-artist and videogame designer living in Miami, FL. Melding gaming, painting, virtual reality, drawing, sculptural furniture, and wearables, Castañeda's work renders surreal posthuman social structures and anatomies. For over ten years Castañeda has been developing the Levels & Bosses series using Unreal Engine to create interconnected transmedia worlds that dissolve the boundary between analog and digital. Today, Levels & Bosses culminates in an episodic video game and exhibition series that expand interaction design in gaming.Castañeda received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2010 and MFA from Hunter College in 2014. Residencies include SOMA Mexico City; "Of Games III" at Khoj International Artists Association in New Delhi India (2015); Bronx Museum AIM Program (2017), and Oolite Arts Studio Residency (2018–2019). To-date Castañeda’s work has been featured across Rhizome, Killscreen, ArtNexus, El Pais, El Nuevo Herald and Vice. Exhibitions and screenings span Hek Basel (2021), Museo la Tertulia (2020), Bronx Museum of the Arts (2017), Bass Museum (2020), Espacio Art Nexus (2017), Frost Art Museum (2012), Children’s Museum of Manhattan (2019), and more. He is a recipient of South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual/Media Artists Fellowship, Locust Projects Wavemaker Grant, Harpo Foundation Grants for Visual Artists, and Oolite Arts Ellies Creator Award. Helping cultivate the next generation of digital artists in South Florida, Castañeda is a professor of 3-D animation at Florida International University and New World School of the Arts in Miami, FL.
