Leonard Koren was born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles.

While a teenager he designed and built a full-scale Japanese tea house out of scavenged materials.

While an undergraduate student at UCLA, Koren was awarded a fellowship to pursue experiments in photographic process. He also worked as an exhibition installer at the university’s fine arts and ethnographic museums.

In 1969 Koren quit school and co-founded the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad, a trompe l’oeil mural painting group that executed large-scale outdoor commissions in Los Angeles and Paris. One of the murals, “Beverly Hills Siddhartha,” covered 5,000 square meters and took a year to complete.

Tired of painting, Koren returned to UCLA and received a master's degree in architecture and urban planning.

From 1973 through 1976 Koren worked as an artist creating bath events, unusual bathing environments, and paper works about bathing.

In 1976 Koren founded WET: THE MAGAZINE OF GOURMET BATHING, an avant-garde publication seminal in the development of postmodern aesthetics.

Burned out on magazine publishing, Koren shut WET down in late 1981 and began a series of sojourns to Tokyo to work on music videos for Japanese television.

From 1983 through 1986 Koren produced a twice-monthly column titled “Dr. Leonardo’s Guide to Cultural Anthropology” for BRUTUS, a popular Japanese lifestyle magazine.

In 1984 Koren wrote and designed New Fashion Japan, a book about the world of Japanese fashion past and present. Stimulated by the book-making process, he continued to make more books.