Lorena Luciano

Lorena Luciano is an Italian and American documentary filmmaker best known for her documentary film It Will Be Chaos, winner of an Emmy Award for Outstanding Current Affairs documentary in 2019. and winner of Best Directing Award at the Taormina International Film Festival. As a director, editor, and writer she has worked on feature documentaries and TV series for national and international cable TV and streamers. She is the recipient of the Sundance Institute/A&E Brave Storyteller Award, and her work has been recognized with art grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the International Documentary Association (IDA), the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Ben & Jerry's Foundation. Lorena Luciano was born and raised in Milan, Italy, where she majored in Law at the University of Milan. Luciano never trained as an attorney, and instead moved to New York, where she founded production company Film2 with film partner and future husband Filippo Piscopo. In New York, she pursued a career in filmmaking. She stayed in the United States, eventually gaining dual citizenship. Luciano's first documentary was Dario Fo and Franca Rame: a Nobel for Two. The film is a portrait of Italian iconoclastic playwright Dario Fo and his lifelong partner and actor Franca Rame. Fo, one of political theater's leading figures, granted Luciano and co-director Filippo Piscopo exclusive access to never-before-seen archival footage of his plays all the way back to 1969. On October 10, 1997, during the late production stage of Luciano's film, Dario Fo unexpectedly won the Nobel Prize for Literature, as the first theater playwright and actor to earn it in the history of the Swedish Academy. Luciano's film on Dario Fo premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was distributed internationally. It also won the Finalist Award at the Houston Film Festival and was acquired by universities worldwide. Luciano's second film, Urbanscapes, was released theatrically in New York City in 2006 and received positive reviews from major publications in the US and Europe. Its theatrical screenings were extended by popular demand. Variety highlighted the "stark, stripped-to-essentials splendor of the film" with scenes that remain in the mind "long after the closing credits". The New York Times wrote: "Urbanscapes plants a camera in neighborhoods gone to seed, cultivating a bittersweet portrait of American ruin", with "an emphasis sticking on those poetically entropic facades".