After many fruitful years, with an accomplished list of big-brand clients, Nencio, as he’s known by all in the business, still engages his passion with fresh-minded humility. Always selective, ‘with the number of different lamps I switch on, every time I face a new project’, Nencio combines his talents uniquely for the ideal portrayal of that one person, product, brand or organisation that his work represents.

Growing up under a journalist father, who worked at the Italian edition of Life Magazine, and with early memories of the crowd of photographers who gathered to work at his family kitchen table, image-based story-telling was in Nencio’s blood from the beginning. He first took in the world from the hills of Florence; the city of his birth, discovering the beauty of landscape and the balance and ease of an image ‘when the sun pops in from all the right angles’. Moving then to Venice, he became versed in the city’s theater of manners and familiar with the effect of dialogue reverberating off the walls of the Venetian alleys, where sounds are mirrored and amplified by water. In the 1970s, Nencio moved to New York City, where the grandiose sense of place filled him with a lifelong drive for meaningful work.

After graduating from the Filmmaking Program at New York University, Nencio moved to Milan in the mid 80s, where he started assisting and learning under top names in the advertising commercials industry, before eventually starting his career as a Commercial Film Director in 1996. Three years later he was awarded a Bronze Lion at Cannes Advertising Film Festival for a Swatch commercial, two years after that, he co-founded AIR3, the Italian Association of Advertising and Music Video Directors and then, in 2005, ‘I Non Luoghi’, his black and white book on Non-Places, received first prize at Orvieto Foto Festival, thus starting off his parallel career as a photographer; with publications and exhibitions throughout Europe following, in subsequent years.

Nowadays, the diversity of Nencio’s work stretches from directing human beings to training animals, from addressing a message with an institutional voice to communicating with punchy comedy and virals, from taking control of a large scale production, to simpler video-making with light digital equipment and a minimal crew. Yet, regardless of equipment or medium, Nencio’s song remains the same: to approach every story in the way that a script and its audience truly desire, aiming to leave all satisfied beyond expectation.