Leon Applebaum was born in 1945, and completed a BFA at Massachusetts’s College of Art, and an MA at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. In 1973, he studied at Orrefor’s Glass School in Sweden where he learned the Swedish style of optically thick glass that would influence his later work. After working for a year at Boda Glass in Sweden, he returned to the US to pursue his MFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His work is noted for his synthesis of the Swedish glass techniques and his own ideas using the color spectrum.