ART PROFILE
Her artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of visual culture, cinema, and digital experimentation, engaging with moments of cultural transition and social transformation. Across different cities, contexts, and historical phases, her work has consistently explored the emergence of new languages and underground scenes, positioning the image as both document and interpretation.
Working across photography, video, writing, and audiovisual production, she has developed a hybrid and process-based approach in which artistic research is inseparable from narrative construction. Technological change is not treated as a disruption, but as a continuum: her current digital practice, carried out exclusively through mobile devices, extends an earlier engagement with immediacy, observation, and responsiveness to the present.
Under the name monna_made, her work focuses on the contemporary image as a mutable and transdisciplinary form. Original photographs and videos become the basis for digital compositions and digi-prints, often conceived as functional art. These works challenge the separation between artistic object and everyday use, questioning notions of authorship, materiality, and permanence in the age of digital reproduction.
Her practice is characterized by a countercurrent perspective that privileges intuition over formal systems and embraces hybridity as a critical position. Through this approach, her work reflects on the relationship between art, technology, and lived experience, offering a visual language that is both grounded in the present and attentive to emerging cultural shifts.
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BIOGRAPHY​
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Her professional and artistic career is marked by an approach focused on innovation, cultural research, and the ability to interpret contemporary transformations in artistic, cinematic, and digital languages.
In the early 1980s she worked in New York, where she documented—through photography and video—the emerging graffiti scene and the cultural environment of the East Village. During this period, she collaborated with artists such as Rammellzee, Toxic, and A-One, and took part in major events including Wigstock 1988. She later worked in Berlin, documenting the cultural transformation processes that followed the fall of the Wall, the historic clubs of the electronic music scene—among them Tresor—and the first editions of the Love Parade in the 1990s.
At the same time, she developed an ongoing activity in the film industry and within international film festivals, participating in events such as the Cannes Film Festival, the Berlinale, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival. During the 1990s, she curated the selection of American independent films for the Florence Film Festival and collaborated with the Italian Cultural Institute in New York on the production of cultural events, including Italy on Stage with Alberto Sordi and Italian New Films at the Museum of Modern Art.
In 1998, she returned to Liguria and founded the first Film Commission in Italy, with the support of public institutions and private foundations. This initiative made a significant contribution to promoting the territory as a film destination, transforming the Italian Riviera into an internationally recognized Film Friendly Area.
She is the creator and producer of events and exhibition projects, including Natur Art (1992–1996), dedicated to the dialogue between sustainable art and science, and The Factory of Andy Warhol (1997). In 2001, she was invited by critic Achille Bonito Oliva to participate as a curator in the exhibition Tribes of Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome.
Writing and narrative design are central to her work. She is the author of film screenplays, including Forever Girls (1988) and Fonda Finds Fonda (1990s), as well as the short film Emoticons – Icons of Emotions (2001). In more recent years, she has developed concepts for television formats and series.
Under the name monna_made, she works in the field of contemporary digital art, creating works exclusively through mobile devices. Her pieces, based on original photographs and videos, take the form of functional art applied to artistic media, design objects, and clothing.
Her interest in cinema began at a young age with the organization of the Gioventù Amore e Rabbia festival (1980). Today, the name “Monna” is the signature of her artistic and digital production.
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