Ruben Ortiz-Torres was born in Mexico City in 1964. Educated within the utopian models of republican Spanish anarchism, soon confronted the tragedies and cultural clashes of post colonial third world. Being the son of a couple of Latin American folklore musicians, he soon identified more with the noises of urban punk music. After giving up the dream of playing baseball in the major leagues and some architecture training (Harvard Graduate School of Design), he decided to study art. He went first to the oldest and one of the most academic art schools of the Americas (the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City) and later to one of the newest and more experimental (CalArts in Valencia CA). After enduring Mexico City's earthquake and pollution he moved to Los Ángeles with a Fullbright grant to survive riots, fires, floods, more earthquakes, shootings and proposition 187. He still hangs around school but now as a Faculty member of the University of California in San Diego. During all this, he has been able to produce artwork in the form of paintings, photographs, objects, sculptures, custom cars and machines, installations, videos, films, text and opera. He has participated in several international exhibitions and film festivals. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museums of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and San Diego, the California Museum of Photography in Riverside CA, the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City, the Jumex collection and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid Spain among others. He was a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores and has won international awards such as the Andrea Frank Foundation Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts in New York, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the C.O.L.A. Individual Artist Fellowship, etc.

After showing his work around the world and be living abroad, he now finally realizes that his parents music was in fact better than most rock’n roll.