Gianluigi Toccafondo was born in 1965 in San Marino, graduated from the Urbino School of Fine Arts, and now lives in Bologna. He is a versatile artist—painter, animator, illustrator, writer, and filmmaker—passionate about graphic art, cinema, and their intersection. In his work, he sets painting in motion through a technique that established him in the 1990s as one of the leading directors of animated cinema: he uses pre-existing images (magazine photos, film stills), which he distorts through photocopying, then reworks with acrylic, pencil, or other media, before re-filming them one by one.