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Born in 1932 in Mexico City, Leonardo Nierman was the only son of Lithuanian Jewish parents, Chanel Nierman and Clara Mendelejis. Nierman's parents had left Lithuania in the 1920s to avoid persecution. His father owned a leather factory in Mexico City. Despite initially pursuing physics and mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, while also playing the violin seriously, Nierman shifted his focus to art because he was not passionate about his studies and he doubted his skill as a musician compared to other violinists.

As a student, Nierman entered an art contest with a single work and won, which was the turning point for him to decide to become a painter. He held his first exhibition shortly after this contest. While Nierman was aware of renowned Mexican figures like Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, his favorite artist was actually the English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, whose expressive, richly colored landscapes seem to have influenced Nierman's burgeoning style.

Nierman's work has often been categorized as Magical Expressionism and, while some have called him the Jackson Pollock of Latin American art, his paintings are more concerned with nature, the cosmos, movement, rhythm, and harmony, in part, because he had played the violin for many years. Throughout his life, Nierman remained an avid concert goer and he traveled to New York City, Israel, and elsewhere. With respect to his palette as a painter, Nierman made regular use of lively, vibrant colors orchestrated in elaborate swirls or geometric configurations. In an abstract sense, Nierman conducted the forms and hues on his canvases to moving effect. Many of Nierman's compositions apppear to showcase natural elements such as wind, lightning, water, fire, and volcanic eruptions as well as fantastic landscapes. In addition to painting, Nierman ventured into sculpture, creating works in marble, silver, gold, bronze, and stainless steel.

Throughout his illustrious career, Nierman was featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Along with being part of notable private collections, large-scale installations by Nierman adorn cities and public spaces worldwide. The Art Institute of Chicago holds Nierman's wool and cotton tapestry, Sonata (1976-1977), in its permanent collection and Nierman's monumental stainless steel sculpture, Flame of the Millennium (2002), is positioned in a central expressway garden on Chicago's West Side. Members of the Kennedy family were known to collect works by Nierman and his tapestries are now at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC and Princeton University in New Jersey.

Additional works by Nierman are held by various prestigious institutions, including the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, the Vatican Museum in Rome, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. While Nierman passed away in 2023 at the age of ninety, his artistic legacy lives on both given his technical mastery and the universal appeal of his oeuvre, which transcends cultural boundaries. Over the course of his life and career, Nierman conducted himself with impressive purpose and channeled his charismatic force of personality into his art to make a lasting impact.