Federica Belli grew up in the countryside of northern Italy. In 2018, while studying Economics and Management at Bocconi University in Milan, she approached photography as Oliviero Toscani's assistant at the creative research centre Fabrica and In the summer of 2019, she moved to New York to work with portrait photographer Chris Buck. During this time, she also became a contributor and photo editor for Musée Magazine.
In 2021, Belli won the BNL BNP Paribas Prize and since then, her work has been presented at major international photography fairs including Paris Photo, Photo London, Zsona Maco, ArtParis and MIA Photo Fair - as well as at the Digital Art Pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale and in institutional exhibitions such as Photographers! at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence. Since 2024, she's one of Exibart's 222 Emerging Artists to Invest In.
At the core of Federica Belli's practice lies an exploration of perception and self-representation. While her earlier photographic works explore the relationship between inner and external perceptions of the self through the language of the self-portrait, the series As Fluid as a Woman expands this enquiry beyond the human body towards other forms of matter. As Belli describes it, she became interested in imagining "not someone else, but rather something else": the possible perception of the substances and elements that surround and constitute us. Through camera-less photograms, seawater, rain, earth, fire and bodily fluids come into direct contact with photosensitive paper, producing what Belli considers self-portraits of these substances. Rather than representing their appearance, the works record their physical interaction with the photographic surface. The paper becomes both image and participant, receiving the traces left by light, chemistry and organic matter. Her practice does not abandon authorship, but redefines it: the artist becomes a facilitator of material interactions, allowing the materials themselves to actively shape the final image.
Today, Belli lives and works between Paris and Mexico City.