Paolo Gioli was born in Sarzano (Rovigo) on October 12, 1942. Beginning in 1960 he centered his artistic activities in Venice where he attended the Scuola Libera del Nudo, part of the Accademia di Belle Arti. In 1967, he travelled to New York, where he received a study grant from the John Cabot Foundation and met gallerists Leo Castelli and Martha Jackson. In New York he would also discover the “New American Cinema.” In 1968, he returned to Italy. Starting in 1970, he would center his activities around Rome, where he came into contact with the Cooperativa Cinema Indipendente. Moving between Rovigo and Rome, he would produce his first films, that he would develop himself using his movie camera as a laboratory, following in the footsteps of the Lumière brothers. In 1976, he moved to Milan, where besides working in cinema, he would make sustained investigations of photography. And from the beginning of the 1980s, Gioli would receive his first important recognition for his activities in photography with a one person show at the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica – Calcografia di Roma (1981), at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1983) and at the Musée Nicéphore Nièpce at Chalon/Saone in the same year; at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie at Arles where his work would be exhibited several times (1982, 1996, 1998) also at the Musée Réattu (1987) and a one-man show at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (1995); his work was featured on the cover of the AIPAD catalogue of 1984. Currently Gioli lives and works in Lendinara. In 2006, the Italian company Rarovideo published a two-dvd set with a selection of fourteen of his films. That same year, Gioli’s films were presented for the first time in Views from the Avant-Garde, a special section of the NYFF, where Gioli has been consistently represented ever since. The following year, he was invited to the Hong Kong International Film Fest as “artist in focus.” In 2008, a selection of his films was presented at the Cinematheque of Ontario in Toronto and in June 2009 the Pesaro Film Festival would pay him a tribute with a complete retrospective of his films. In December 2009, a monograph was published by the SCS-Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome on his work as a filmmaker. In June of this year, the Cinematheque Française in Paris honoured him with a fairly complete retrospective of his work. In Autumn he was invited at both Toronto and New York Film Festivals.
