© Ilaria Di Biagio
Cristina Vatielli (b. Rome) is an Italian photographer.
After graduating from the Scuola Romana di Fotografia in 2004 she started as a photography assistant and has subsequently specialized in post-production working with Paolo Pellegrin and other prominent photographers.
She went on to producing her projects rooted in deep research with historical-documentary approach.
Since 2006 she has been working on Exilio de dentro, a project exploring the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War. She continued to deepen her documentary language, producing several reportages and contributing to Italian and international magazines. The encounter with the Finnish photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen in 2008 represented a meaningful exchange and led her to the exploration of the self-portrait technique. From that pivotal moment self-portrait has become the means of telling universally inspiring stories.
In 2016 she realized Le Donne di Picasso, a series of reenacted self-portraits that give a voice to the suffering of eight women who had loved Pablo Picasso. This work marks the beginning of the collaboration with the cinema costume designer Lisangela Sabbatella, leading to the formation of a small team of professionals towards deepening the language of the mise-en-scène, something that Cristina adopted in the years of early training as a photographer. Cristina’s most recent project,
Sin Hombre (2019), is a free reconstruction of the love story between two Spanish women who managed to get married in a church in 1901.
Both Le Donne di Picasso and Sin Hombre are the first chapters of a larger project that delves into the lives of individuals who left a lasting mark on history while choosing to remain in the shadows.
In 2021, together with her life partner and video-maker Ippolito Simion, brings to life the project Terra Mater which aims to investigate the relationship between earth and human fertility by concentrating upon the fragility of the individual in contrast to the greatness of our planet.
Between late 2024 and early 2025, she focused on producing and creating the photographic project Elvira Notari, La Madre del Cinema Italiano with Teresa Saponangelo portraying the first female director in Italy's history.