Umberto Stefanelli is a 35-year old Italian fashion and advertising photographer.

His career developed between New York and Milan, where he created vibrant pictures for the fashion designer Piercouture, who designed clothes created with natural hair (an artistic project promoted by L’Oreal).

He collaborated with Levi’s Strauss to prepare an advertising campaign, creating two Polaroid collages entitled “Dina wore them” and “Leveyes”, exhibited at the Levi’s Gallery in New York.

In July 1999 he was selected as a finalist for Surface Magazine’s 1999 Avant Guardians project.

He also collaborated with YOUNG & RUBICAM in New York to a special advertising project entitled “Artvertising”.

During the last years Umberto Stefanelli has undertaken a project aiming to fuse advertising images and a personal artistic expression of vanguard.

His work is surely out of the ordinary; each piece of art is unique, beginning with the paper that he paints, guilds, marbleizes or treats in a particular way before printing the image.

Unique pieces are also the Polaroid collages, composed by photographs and other elements, performed on cardboard, wood or canvas.

Umberto Stefanelli has been appointed as a lecturer during the 4^th International Congress of professional photographers and imaging, which was held in Orvieto in March 2002.

Within the same period Stefanelli collaborated with Polaroid Italy in a successful demonstration of the Polaroid 50 x 60, a highly sophisticated camera (one of only six of its kind in the world) also used by Milan agency Photomovie, for a photographic exhibition in progress, an event which ran alongside some of the most important European cinematography exhibitions (Venice, Berlin, Taormina, Cannes)

Last July his Portfolio was published by the prestigious art-photo magazine ZOOM INTERNATIONAL.