Ryan Leitner is an American contemporary artist that fuses digital manipulation, photography, sculpture, and painting to create collages and related work that explores queer histories, fantasy, and gender. Leitner constructs his work by hand, building obtuse and often gravity defying objects that reflect his nomadic upbringing and queer heritage. Using archival material, clay, and alternative printing practices, his collages reflect a queered landscape of bodies and ambiguous spaces. Growing up in a navy family, he had circled the globe by the age of 6 and had moved over a dozen times by the age of 10. During high school, he taught himself photography and photo manipulation in a darkroom he built in his families basement. Since then he has been utilizing the medium while traveling from Chicago to London, New York, Boston, and now New Orleans. After receiving his MFA from The Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, he began investigating his queerness through different mediums, looking for different ways queer visibility is created in public spaces. Traveling around the country and Europe to understand how, why, and where queer public sites are made, he is currently working to create the first Queer Memorial site in the city of New Orleans. Leitner has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the The LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, Antenna’s Platform Fund, and The Museum of Fine Arts, has been published in The Journal of Homosexuality, and has exhibited at The Plumbing Museum, Area Gallery, and Magnum Photo Foundation, and The Front Gallery.