Vik Muniz, Vicente Jose Muniz (born 1961, São Paulo, Brazil) is a visual artist living in New York City.

Muniz began his career as a sculptor in the late 1980s after relocating from Brazil to Chicago and later to New York. His early work grew out of a post-Fluxus aesthetic and often involved visual puns and jokes. His most famous work from this period is “Clown Skull”, a human skull augmented with a clown-nose shaped protuberance.

Muniz’s work begins to take on its mature form with The Best of Life (1990) where he drew pictures of photographs included in the coffee table book “The Best of Life” from memory after losing the book in a move. The drawings were subsequently photographed and shown as photographs, a practice that Muniz continues.

Muniz followed “The Best of Life” with Equivalents (1993), Pictures of Wire (1994), and Pictures of Thread (1995) in which he developed the other aspect of his characteristic style by making the drawings out of readily recognizable non-art materials (i.e. cotton, wire, or thread). This process of making a drawing out of a nontraditional material and then photographing it has been central to Muniz’s work ever since. In 1996 he made “Sugar Children” for which he received critical acclaim. The New York Times reviewed the show and Muniz was invited to participate in the 1997-1998 New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Muniz became best known for his 1997 series Pictures of Chocolate and 2006's Pictures of Junk but he has worked in many materials (dust, caviar, diamonds, paper, earthworks and pigment to name a few) and has exhibited his work in major museums and galleries around the world.

In 2010, the documentary film Waste Land, directed by Lucy Walker, featured Muniz's work with a group of catadores—self-designated pickers of recyclable materials—on one of the world's largest garbage dumps, Jardim Gramacho, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The film was nominated to the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 83rd Academy Awards.

(From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vik_Muniz )