For over 30 years, Brett Leonard has been an award-winning film maker and technologist at the forefront of the digital media revolution. He is widely recognized as a top thought-leader in A.I. and Virtual Reality since introducing the concept and term of VR to popular culture as the Director/Writer of the seminal hit cult-classic film “Lawnmower Man” starring Pierce Brosnan, which is also one of the most commercially successful independent films of all time, grossing over $200MM globally in all markets on a $5MM budget. Brett was one of the first to pioneer modern stereoscopic techniques and photo-realistic CGI in his hit IMAX 3D film “T-Rex” (100MM on IMAX screens alone), and introduced American audiences to Russell Crowe in his film “Virtuosity” (which also starred Denzel Washington) along with many other talents both in front of and behind the camera. “Virtuosity” depicted the training of a large language model in relation to a Virtual Human character decades before ChatGPT.

Brett’s numerous awards include an MTV Award for his groundbreaking Perter Gabriel video / ride film “Kiss That Frog”, and he is a recipient of the Producer’s Guild and Variety Magazine’s “Digital 25” Award, honoring the top 25 visionaries and innovators in emerging entertainment who have made the greatest impact on digital entertainment and storytelling – the other director recipients that year were James Cameron and Ridley Scott. This year in 2026 Brett was induced into the “AWE XR Hall Of Fame”, honoring pioneers in Immersive Entertainment and Technology.

Brett’s work as a visionary Director/Producer/Futurist has always pushed the edge of innovation in the entertainment industry, and continues to do so with a project slate at his production company Ascension Interactive with partner Louis Lombard,, dedicated to defining a new process of content production for the emerging era of Generative A.I. and Immersive Interactive StoryWorlds.

Brett is also the co-founder of a company called UbiquityVX with business pioneer David Kerzner and world-renown clinical VR researcher Dr. Albert ‘Skip’ Rizzo, with a mission to provide groundbreaking Virtual Therapies on an accessible easy-to-use web-based platform that can be described as the “Netflix of Interactive Health, Wellness and Performance”

Brett recently completed work with the Entertainment Technology Center at USC (founded by George Lucas) as a core team member of the Narrative Context Protocol (NCP) project, which is a next-generation A.I. interactive story-engineering format designed to enable creative professionals a developmental process for both traditional legacy storytelling forms, and the new medium of Emergent Interactive Narrative StoryWorlds. Brett’s involvement with the NCP project is indicative of his passion for pioneering new mediums of human interaction and story.

Brett’s core philosophy, born out in all of his work is: “To empower people to create and experience transformative story, character, and emotion in any medium, no matter what the technology being used to enable it”