Born in Puglia in 1998 and raised within a Christian cult, Lilly’s early life unfolded inside the walls of her family home in Andria.
She studied to become a surveyor in high school before moving to Milan to attend NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti), where she graduated cum laude as a visual artist and curator, only to change direction and return to her hometown.
Back in Puglia alone, a period of independence and experimentation led her to work as a design assistant in a renewable energy engineering firm, a time that often brought to mind what Carmelo Bene once said: “You can’t make art with art, nor theatre with theatre”.
Indeed, she does not consider that time a distance from her artistic path, but an integral part of it. In July 2025, after three years, she chose to leave that profession as the need to suspend function and inhabit a form of expression incompatible with usefulness emerged.
Painting entered her practice quietly. An elusive quality runs through these works, often originating from her own photographs and self-portraits. Selfies that in turn originate from time spent observing oneself interacting with one’s own space, with new objects, with one’s own appearance, creating one’s own mythology and painting it like primitive men painted animals in caves, through a sympathetic magic. To possess the spirit of the animal even before the hunt.
She works primarily with acrylics and has turned her former bedroom into a studio containing only an easel and a treadmill.
