Enrique Martínez Celaya is an artist, author, and former scientist whose work encompasses painting, sculpture, drawing, immersive environments, essays, poetry, and fiction. His practice examines the experience of the individual amid social, ethical, and existential conditions, and the capacity of art to widen perception and lend structure to meaning. These concerns take form through materials ranging from oil paint and bronze to tar, blood, and sugar, as he investigates the nature of art, memory, exile, and the legacies of history.

His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in more than sixty public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, The Huntington, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has undertaken major projects and installations worldwide, including at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, and has participated in two-person exhibitions with historical figures such as Albert Pinkham Ryder, Käthe Kollwitz, and Diego Velázquez.

Martínez Celaya is the author of nine books on art, philosophy, and poetry, including two volumes of Collected Writings and Interviews published by the University of Nebraska Press. He recently completed his first novel and has co-authored Tending the Fire: Creativity, Purpose, and the Unfolding Self with the Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis, as well as Pebbles: The Commonalities and Divergences of Art and Science with Nobel laureate chemist Roald Hoffmann and the philosopher and physicist Aleksandr P. Svitin, all forthcoming. His work has been the subject of fourteen monographic publications, including Martínez Celaya, SEA SKY LAND: towards a map of everything and Enrique Martínez Celaya and Käthe Kollwitz: Von den ersten und den letzten Dingen, both published by Hatje Cantz, Berlin.

He is the first Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California. His teaching integrates literature, philosophy, and art, reflecting a sustained commitment to education and inquiry across disciplines. In 2025, he received USC’s highest faculty honor, the Associates Award for Artistic Expression. He has also served as Roth Family Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, as the second Presidential Professor in the history of the University of Nebraska, and as a tenured professor at Pomona College. In 2021, he was awarded a Doctor honoris causa by Otis College of Art and Design. He was the first Visual Arts Fellow at The Huntington Library, where his sculpture became the institution’s first contemporary acquisition in its century-long history.

He has been invited to speak at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Academy in Berlin, Stanford University, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Aspen Institute, the Royal Drawing School in London, and the Aspen Center for Physics. In 2020, he delivered the commencement address at Otis College of Art and Design. In 1998, he founded Whale & Star, an initiative integrating artistic mentorship, cultural engagement, and publishing in critical theory, art, and poetry. The initiative also established The Lecture Project, a forum bringing together leading writers and scholars to examine the ethical dimensions of art. His collaborations extend across disciplines, including a twenty-year partnership with the Canadian rock band Cowboy Junkies.

Martínez Celaya began his training as a painter’s apprentice at the age of twelve. At sixteen, he built a laser that received national recognition, and during his youth he published poems, essays, and short stories. He studied applied physics, literature, and art at Cornell University, where he worked at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source. He went on to earn an M.S. and completed Ph.D. coursework in quantum electronics at the University of California, Berkeley, supported by a Regents Fellowship and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Before devoting himself fully to art, he received patents and authored scientific papers in laser physics and superconductivity. He later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture on an honorary scholarship and earned his M.F.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1994, where he received the department’s highest distinction and served as a Junior Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. After graduation, he joined Pomona College as a professor and, two years later, received the Young Talent Award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.