Biography
Francesca Fini is an interdisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and performer whose practice thrives on the friction between tradition and innovation. Moving fluidly across cinema, live media performance, installation, and artificial intelligence, she constructs poetic, surreal, and often unsettling narratives that question the boundaries between body, technology, and identity.
Over the years, Fini’s work has been presented at major international venues and festivals including the WRO Biennale (Poland), CINEMED Film Festival (Montpellier), 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.
AI-Driven Practice In recent years, Francesca Fini has emerged as a pioneering voice in AI-based filmmaking and digital performance. Her projects blend neural image generation, cinematic animation workflows, sound design, 3D reconstruction, and digital compositing to build immersive post-human mythologies and poetic techno-landscapes. Among her notable works are LOVE, Masks of Sand, Meccanimus (commissioned for the Singapore F1 night race), the ongoing series HELLO WORLD, Pink Reverie, and Shifting Sands. These works explore android emotion, memory, and identity in post-anthropocentric futures, positioning Fini at the forefront of experimental AI cinema. Her practice navigates the liminal space where embodied performance meets synthetic vision, tracing the emotional contours of hybrid existence in an age of intelligent images.