Giovanni Casadei

Giovanni Casadei was born and raised in Rome, Italy. As a child, his uncle regularly took him to art museums, and Giovanni knew he wanted to paint. When he was 14 years old, Giovanni had saved up enough money to buy an oil painting kit. From 1978 to 1980, Casadei studied at Scuola Libera del Nudo (Free School for Drawing and Painting sponsored by the Academy of Fine Art of Rome) under the instruction of the Armenian artist, Alfonso Avanessian.  From 1980 to 1981, he studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Rome, and from 1981 to 1983, he studied again with Alfonso Avanessian.  During this time, he experimented with drawing, oil pastels, dry pastels tempera, watercolor, acrylic, and oil paintings. 

In 1983, at the age of 27, Casadei moved to Philadelphia, where he continues to live and work.  In the early days, he worked as a house painter by day and an artist by night. In 1998, he enrolled in a four-year certificate program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.  Casadei has been a well-respected and well-known artist for many years, with house painting only in his memory.

 As an artist, Casadei tries to capture a moment in time.  He is inspired by light, colors, and the visual abstractions that nature offers us.  For over twenty years, he has been showing and selling his work in Philadelphia and other major cities for the last twenty years. Over this same time period, Casadei has also been teaching painting at various art venues in the Philadelphia area.