Chiara Clemente

Short Biography

The elder daughter of painter Francesco and performer Alba, Clemente was born in Rome and moved to New York when she was five. She spent much of her childhood living in her father’s Great Jones Street studio, where the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Julien Schnabel would wander in and stay for her mother’s home cooking. She and her sister, Nina, had playdates, complete with toys, with Keith Haring.Clemente always loved storytelling, and at age 12 asked her parents for a Sony High 8 video camera. After graduating from Dalton in 1996, she headed to film school at the Pasadena Art Center and then moved to Rome, where she made a series of art documentaries for the Italian Rai Sat Art Channel, on subjects like Frank Gehry and Brice Marden. In 2002, she directed “Three Worlds: A Portrait of Francesco Clemente, ” a documentary about her father.