Eugenio Zanetti

Born in Córdoba (Argentina), he lives and works in Buenos Aires and Los Angeles.

Eugenio Zanetti is one of the most well worldwide known Argentine visual creators. His multifaceted artistic activity ranges from film direction, opera and theatre, to set design, illustration and painting. His vast and famous career embraces five decades, with more than 60 film and theatre productions under his credit in Argentina, Europe and the United States.  In his beginnings, he worked with Pier Paolo Pasolini in his 1969 “Medea” and, during his prolific career in Hollywood, he has designed and directed the visual realization of numerous multi-award-winning films such as “Flatliners”, “Last Action Hero”, “Soapdish”, “Promised Land”, “Slamdance”, “The Haunting” and “Restoration”, for which he received the Oscar for best production design and art direction in 1996. In 1999 he received another Oscar nomination in the same category for “What dreams may come”. In recent years he has been in charge of the artistic production of Alfonso Arau’s “Zapata, the dream of the hero” and Roland Joffé’s “You will find dragons”. He has written and directed the feature film “Amapola”, with Geraldine Chaplin, which premiered in 2014, for which he has received several international awards, including the best director at the Bogota International Film Festival. Prolific and multifaceted, he is considered one of the great contemporary masters as an illustrator and a visionary of unreal spaces. Zanetti generates an indisputable imprint in each of his creations: his recent productions of the operas “Don Carlo” by Verdi and “Fidelio” by Beethoven at the Teatro Colón were acclaimed by critics and the public. But equally extraordinary has been his career as a painter, which he has recently compiled in detail in his first biographical book “Zanetti – Known / Unknown”, in which his fertile materialized work was catalogued in paintings, drawings and sketches of cinema, theatre and opera from 1964. Numerous exhibitions in various museums and galleries placed his work worldwide in several private collections and museums. He has been granted three Honoris Causa Doctorates for his visual work by Universities in Spain and Argentina, and has been appointed Cultural Ambassador of Argentina and declared Honorary Citizen of Córdoba, Buenos Aires and Los Angeles (USA).