Biography and Statement
Francesca Fini is an Italian interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, performer, and AI creative producer working across contemporary art, experimental cinema, video art, performance, installation, artificial intelligence, 3D animation, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Her practice explores the shifting boundaries between body and machine, organic and synthetic, presence and simulation, through hybrid works that combine poetic intensity, speculative imagination, and technological experimentation.
With a background in directing, cinematography, editing, sound design, and film production, she brings a deeply cinematic sensibility to all areas of her research. Her work spans experimental films, AI-driven visual narratives, immersive installations, AR and VR experiences, and performance-based projects in which moving image, digital environments, and live presence converge.
Rather than using technology as spectacle, Francesca Fini approaches it as a critical and expressive medium through which new forms of embodiment, storytelling, and perception can emerge. Her projects often investigate identity, transformation, memory, and the unstable relationship between human and artificial, developing worlds that are at once intimate, visionary, and unsettling.
Presented internationally in festivals, exhibitions, and digital platforms, her work reflects an ongoing commitment to expanding the language of contemporary art through a practice where action, space, and simulation become inseparable.
Over the years, Fini’s work has been presented at major international venues and festivals including the WRO Biennale (Poland), NordArt International Art Exhibition (Germany), Berlin Directors Lounge and IKONO TV Film Festival (Germany), Videoformes Festival (Clermont-Ferrand), Szczecin European Film Festival – SEFF (Poland), FILE Electronic Language Festival (Brazil), Athens Videoart Festival, Proyector Festival (Madrid), CYBERFEST and Now&After (Russia), Robot Festival (Bologna), Instants Video numériques et poétiques (Marseille), MANIFESTA12 collateral events (Palermo), IMAGE PLAY, MEM Festival at the Guggenheim Bilbao, BODY + CAMERA at MANA Contemporary Chicago, Un-Becoming at SomoS Berlin, the Japan Media Arts Festival (Tokyo), the Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition (Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta), as well as MAXXI and MACRO in Rome.
She has held notable solo exhibitions including BODY (S)CUL(P)TURE at Fondazione Dino Zoli (Forlì), My Name is Francesca (online, 2020), Other Identity Biennale (Genoa, 2019), Cyborg Fatale at Narkissos Gallery (Bologna, 2019), and RED (Rome, 2018). Her work has also been shown at The Arts House (Singapore), Palazzo Merulana and Galleria d’Arte Moderna (Rome), Photopia Festival (Hamburg), FILE Festival (São Paulo), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome), and in the Takeda Italia Metaverse project.
As a performer, she took part in the landmark first edition of the Venice International Performance Art Week, alongside Valie Export, Yoko Ono, Jan Fabre, Marina Abramović, and Hermann Nitsch. She has been an artist-in-residence at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center (New York, 2014 and 2016) and at Rocca Sinibalda Castle (Italy, 2022).
As a movie director, she wrote and directed Ophelia Did Not Drown; an experimental feature film based on the hybridization between found-footage (from the national archive Istituto Luce Cinecittà) and original contemporary performative language, considered by legendary movie art critic Adriano Aprà, one of the best Italian experimental art film of all times.
She is cited by Treccani Encyclopedia as one of the greatest exponents of cyber-performance in Italy.
I do not approach technology as spectacle, nor as a neutral tool. I treat it as a living and unstable field, one that allows me to question authorship, embodiment, identity, and the increasingly fragile boundary between the organic and the artificial.
My background in performance art deeply shapes the way I work, even when the final piece takes the form of a film, a digital environment, or an AI-generated sequence. I do not begin from plot in a conventional sense. I begin from an action, a spatial intuition, a visual force, or a bodily necessity. From there, the work develops as a process of emergence, where space, movement, rhythm, and transformation become the true structure of meaning.
In recent years, artificial intelligence has become a central medium in my practice. What interests me is not the production of seamless illusion or decorative perfection, but the possibility of building images and actions that feel psychologically and formally unavoidable. I use AI to open new territories for performance, cinema, and visual thought: territories where simulation does not erase presence, but reframes it.
Across my work, bodies merge with machines, landscapes become mental states, and visual worlds oscillate between the intimate and the dystopian, the sacred and the post-human. I am drawn to thresholds: between human and nonhuman, ritual and interface, physical matter and computational image.
