 He studied Visual Arts and Photography in Munich, Cape Town and New York City.His works are ongoing, often participatory projects, which examine the relationship between individual lives and societies, history, landscape and architecture.For instance, Leist submitted an entry to the World Trade Center site Memorial Competition in which he proposed erecting 2,792 memorial telephone booths around the "footprints" of the former WTC site, around New York City or in any of the 92 counties where victims were from.