Vik Muniz (b. 1961) is one of the most inventive contemporary Brazilian artists, whose ingenious approach to image-making has established him as a defining voice in international photography and contemporary art. Born in São Paulo, Muniz pursued his artistic training at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he developed the signature approach for which he is now internationally recognized. His mature practice involves constructing intricate images from unconventional everyday materials, from chocolate syrup and sugar to garbage, dust, diamonds, and dry pigment, which he then photographs at large scale to produce his finished works.

Muniz's most celebrated projects have taken this approach in remarkable directions. His Pictures of Chocolate series recreated iconic images from art history in flowing chocolate syrup; his Pictures of Garbage transformed refuse gathered from one of the world's largest landfills in Rio de Janeiro into monumental portraits of the workers who lived and labored there; his Diamond Divas series rendered images of Hollywood glamour in loose scatterings of precious stones. Each of these bodies of work depends on the tension between the base or ephemeral quality of the materials and the elevated status of the images they compose, and each raises questions about representation, value, and the peculiar relationship between the photographic image and the physical world it records.

Muniz's Pictures of Garbage project became the subject of the acclaimed 2010 documentary Waste Land, which chronicled his collaboration with the catadores who sorted materials at the Jardim Gramacho landfill outside Rio de Janeiro. The film brought his work to a broader international audience and highlighted the socially engaged dimension of his practice.

Muniz's work has been exhibited in major institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the São Paulo Museum of Art. His photographs are held in the collections of the leading contemporary art museums globally, and he remains one of the most widely admired figures in Latin American contemporary art today.