Giuliana Cunéaz was born in Aosta and lives and works in Milan. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin and uses all artistic media, from video-installations to sculpture, from photography to painting, and even painted screens.
In the early Nineties, she embarked on an avenue of research that involved exploring forms combined with video experimentation. Her first works convey a personal re-elaboration of minimalist languages and those related to Arte Povera.
In 1990 she created Il silenzio delle fate [The silence of the fairies], an installation located in the Valle d’Aosta featuring 24 music iron stands with a marble musical score. Each contained a part of a musical composition, whose entirety was represented by the sum of the single elements. Each music stand, however, had an independent destiny and was located in a place characterised by the memory of a legend about fairies. This work of art, therefore, even then demonstrated a complex multitude, the red thread of all future work.
In 1991she created Lucciole [Fireflies], her first video installation with screens that reproduced the fixed image of the space concealed below the television. 1993 was the year of In Corporea Mente, a flexible work that draws its origins from research on the imaginary body, which is considered to have surpassed studies elated to Body Art on an emotional level. Gillo Dorfles judges this work as “portent of a new and, in fair part, original realization of the future of today’s visual art, and perhaps of that of the near future”.
Her research on the imaginary body continues in the years that follow with Sub Rosa (1995-1996) which involves creating three videosculptures Corpus in Fabula, Biancaneve and Pneuma where the almost ethereal structures in white and transparent Perspex contain realistic images of blood and flesh taken from heart surgery. The sculpture, basically takes on an ambivalent aspect, between the fabled presence of the body (there is no lack of references to the work of Gustav Klimt) and its physical concreteness.
In 1998 with L’Offrande du Coeur and Il Cervello nella Vasca [The brain in a vat] (1998-2000) Giuliana Cunéaz tackles the theme of complexity, one of the crucial areas of her research. The artist questions herself on the creative process and on its development by breaking up the unitariness of the work seen as a simple product. And she does so first by examining a fifteenth century tapestry, whose tapisserie are transformed into an interactive panel, (L’Offrande du Coeur) and then by re-working scientific experiments from a creative perspective (Il Cervello nella Vasca). The latter work also encompassed Transire, a video that examines the alterations of an individual with respect to the ordinary state of consciousness. Giuliana Cunéaz conceives the work of art as a challenge, a passage, or even how to reach the limits of the conscience.
In the Officine pastello project (1999-2002) that included Biostory, Riti sciamanici and Discoteca, the artist seeks laboratories of emotions – the officine pastello – aimed to solicit the sphere of sensorial and emotional perception through experimentation on oneself and on others in an unnatural or artificially created environment.
This line of research also extended to the videos and photographs that are part of the Riti Sciamanici [Shamanic Rituals], possibly her most well-known work, in which the Shaman is the intermediary to live through a collective experience of a tribal nature. But even he becomes wholly involved in his performance before the onlookers thus eliminating any element of a documentary nature.
In 2003 Giuliana Cunéaz created Terrains Vagues, an important video installation on the very concept of identity. With the assistance of several citizens of Berlin, the artists reflects on the relationship between the physical nature of a place and man’s feelings. No longer the relationship between the imaginary body and the mind therefore, or the need to create laboratories of emotions, but an extension of oneself within a research perspective in which Giuliana Cunéaz takes a course which is always on the threshold, but still fully real. No coincidence in a non-place inside the city each person buried an object that was particularly dear to them, and then unearthed it again so that its disappearance and slow re-emergence allow the object to recharge itself with a new symbolic worth.
Also in the case of Punkabbestia, also in 2003, displayed that year at the Quadrennial, the artist created a video installation in which the modern metropolitan tribe accompanied by their dogs become the inhabitants of tents which are ancestral and post-modern at the same time. Once again, therefore, the artist creates a divergent course where what has happened in a place becomes the metaphor of an emotional journey that challenges indifference. This all leads her, the following year, to create Zona Franca, a world in which the inhabitants live on the rooftops of houses and in that place of absolute freedom, they can give free rain to their creativity. “I like the idea that men migrate and occupy a new territory, creating a new form of cohabitation by changing the perceptive and relational process”, explains the artist.
In 2005 3D became part of her research, so much so that it became an area of research both in terms of video and painted screens. The acquisition of a technological tool is not, obviously, a an end in itself, but is part of a research in which the artist acquires data from the world of science and nanoscience to transform them into a sort of virtual landscape that interacts continuously with the real data. This happens in the Quantum Vacuum, and in another video from 2005 I Mangiatori di Patate [The potato eaters] inspired by the painting of the same name by Van Gogh. 
Giuliana Cunéaz has identified a completely new dimension, where natural elements are actualized through 3D images and the use of nanotechnologies. This was the starting point for Occulta naturae (2006) and, afterwards, for The Growing Garden (2007- 2008), where moving virtual images exist side by side with painterly elements. What we see, therefore, is a sophisticated elaboration where art, for Giuliana Cuneaz, continues to be a self-sufficient, individual way for challenging the laws of physics and reinterpreting the whole environment around us.

Giuliana Cunéaz started to exhibit her work in well-known public and private exhibitions in Italy and abroad in the early nineties. She also participated in the Videoformes Festival in 1991, 1993 and 1996.
In 1994, she took part in the Saõ Paolo Biennial in Brazil and in 1996 she exhibited her work at the Obalne Galerie in Pirano in Slovenia. In 2002, her works were shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. In Italy, in 1995 her work appeared at the Revoltella Museum in Trieste; in 2000 at the Pecci Museum in Prato and at the Torre del Lebbroso in Aosta. In 2001 she staged solo exhibitions at Castello Ursino in Catania and at the Museum Laboratory of Contemporary Art at La Sapienza University in Rome. In 2002, she participated in Exit at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin. In 2003 she staged two solo exhibitions at the Play Gallery in Berlin and at the B & D gallery in Milan. Also in 2003, one of her video installations was displayed at the Festival of Italian Cinema in Annecy. In Annecy, in the same year, she also represented Italy in an exhibition entitled Shift which involved 9 European artists. In 2004, as part of the Quadrennial exhibitions in Rome, she participated in Anteprima in Turin. In 2005, she staged a solo exhibition at the Gas Gallery in Turin.
In 2005 and 2008, two solo shows of her works were held at the Gas Gallery in Turin. Again in 2008, Silvana Editoriale published an important monograph that reviews over twenty years of her work.