As an immigrant child - he was born in Cuba and grew up in Puerto Rico, where his parents fled when he was 4 - he wrestled with the meanings of displacement, nationality and cultural identity. After earning a fine-arts degree in Puerto Rico, Ernesto went to New York to study media and art therapy and, as an openly gay man, became immersed in AIDS activism.

Ernesto is a conceptual artist with a multimedia and interdisciplinary art practice. Between 1975 and 1979, he pursued undergraduate work in humanities and visual arts at the University of Puerto Rico, and Spanish art history at the Universidad Complutence, Madrid. Between 1984 and 1990, Ernesto pursued graduate work in education at the Universidad Interamericana, San Juan, in art therapy, at Pratt Institute, and in media theory, at Hunter College, NY.

Ernesto has taught at Cooper Union, NY, La Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico, San Juan, the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. He has lectured at New York University, the School of Visual Arts, NY, Bezalel Academy of Art & Design, Jerusalem, and The Maine College of Art, Portland, among many others. Between 2006 and 2007, he served as a Distinguished Fellow in Interdisciplinary Art through the Sculpture Department, Graduate Program, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

During the 1990s, Ernesto became known for site-specific ephemeral installation projects addressing individual and collective memory, and, more recently, for pressing ecological issues, war and mourning. In 1997, Ernesto represented the United States in the Second Johannesburg Biennial, South Africa, the Second Saaremaa Biennial, Estonia, and the Sixth Havana Biennial, Cuba.

Ernesto is currently working as Curatorial Consultant for the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico. In addition, he recently formed a performance group for a 12-hour durational piece at the Grand Army of the Republic Rotunda, in the Chicago Cultural Center. Since 2004, Ernesto has also worked as part of an interdisciplinary team led by curator Mary Jane Jacob for the Spoleto Festival/USA, co-designing a memorial garden for Charleston, SC, which will be inaugurated in spring 2008.

Ernesto Pujol has been the recipient of fellowships from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Cintas Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. He has served with the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Academy for Educational Development, and the National Endowment for the Arts.