Born in Cuba in 1964, Enrique Martínez Celaya majored in applied physics at Cornell University and pursued a PhD in quantum electronics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was supported by a fellowship from the Brookhaven National Laboratory. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine and received his MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was an associate professor at Pomona College and the Claremont Graduate University (1994–2003) and was Visiting Presidential Professor at the University of Nebraska (2007–10).

His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig and others. His awards include the Anderson Ranch National Artist Award, the California Community Foundation Fellowship, J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art Here and Now Award and the Hirsch Grant. In 1998 he founded Whale and Star, a publishing house whose books are distributed internationally.

Among Martinez Celaya’s numerous books are Enrique Martínez Celaya: Collected Writings and Interviews, 1990-2010 (Nebraska, 2010) and, now available, Enrique Martínez Celaya: Collected Writings and Interviews, 2010-2017 (Nebraska, 2019). These collections of writings include public lectures; essays; interviews; correspondence with artists, critics, and scholars; artist statements; blog posts; and journal entries, and images of the artist’s sculptures and paintings are featured throughout.

Marked by Martínez Celaya’s encyclopedic curiosity and considerable knowledge about the world, these writings and interviews explore the role of art in life, evaluate texts by other modern and contemporary artists and thinkers, and reveal the artist’s deep engagement with artistic, philosophical, and literary lines of inquiry.