Background
Eric Staller was born on September 14, 1947, in Mineola, New York, United States. He is the oldest of five children. His father is a real estate developer and his mother a homemaker.
Eric Staller
2004
FISH-O-VISION, 2004 designed and photographed by Eric Staller
The University of Michigan
ConferenceBike
1983
(Eric Staller is best known for his Volkswagen Lightmobile...)
Eric Staller is best known for his Volkswagen Lightmobile, a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle covered with 1659 computerized light bulbs. It was completed in March 1985, 5 months after the project began. This work of art is well known and has traveled around the world. The Volkswagen Lightmobile also appeared in the movie The Money Pit (1986). He has titled his mobile public artwork "urban UFO's".
1985
Eric Staller was born on September 14, 1947, in Mineola, New York, United States. He is the oldest of five children. His father is a real estate developer and his mother a homemaker.
His father's avocation has been architecture, this inspired Eric Staller to study architecture himself. He earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1971. Toward the end of his tenure at the University of Michigan, Eric Staller began to create sculptures and performance arts.
In the fall of 1971, Eric Staller moved to New York City and lived there until 1991. He had purchased an 1829-vintage Lutheran Church, located in Lyons, PA. He used and renovated the church as a weekend retreat until 1991, then decided to move out of New York to live full-time in Lyons, PA.
Eric Staller had wanted to live in Europe after he had visited Amsterdam in 1988 to show his work at an opening of a gallery show. In September 1994 with his wife and son, he moved to Amsterdam. Soon after that Eric Staller went through some personal changes with his family and focused on his work as an artist.
In January 1999, at the Schiphol Airport, he had met and then soon after married a Dutch filmmaker, Sietske Tjallingii. Eric Staller lived in Amsterdam for fifteen years before moving back to the United States to the city of San Francisco in 2010.
Eric Staller has been one of the pioneers of art movements, such as Performance Arts, Light Painting, and Art Cars, as well as the inventor of the Conference Bike, which is a seven-seat human-powered vehicle. The trade name is the ConferenceBike which was developed in the late 1980s. There are more than 250 ConferenceBikes in 16 countries. The ConferenceBike has become a powerful symbol and tool for bringing people together.
