Giorgio Angelini comes to filmmaking with a multi-faceted background in the creative arts. After touring in bands like The Rosebuds and Bishop Allen for much of his 20s, Giorgio enrolled in the Masters of Architecture program at Rice University during the depths of the 2008 real estate collapse. It was during this tumultuous time that the seeds for Giorgio’s directorial debut, ​OWNED: A Tale of Two Americas​ began to take shape.

Following graduate school, Angelini helped open the boutique architecture firm, Schaum Shieh Architects, with his former professor, Troy Schaum. Their first collaboration was an installation at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale entitled “About Face.” The installation built on a long-running study of Detroit’s rapidly eroding suburban fabric. The project explored a non-domestic future for the strange urban planning condition the city was facing.  Through the construction of architectural interventions, the ambition was to help stitch back together a new kind of public space in the alienating physical vastness that the foreclosure crisis left between homes.

After their success in Venice, team went on to design the White Oak Music Hall in Houston, Texas, which won multiple AIA design awards.  The headquarters for The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology, which won the Architect’s Newspaper’s “Design of the Year” award in 2018. And several other design restoration and preservation projects for clients like The Judd Foundation in Marfa, TX.

Giorgio’s experience working on issues of housing both in graduate school and at Schaum Shieh Architects led him to his directorial debut, OWNED: A Tale of Two Americas. The film toured the country, exhibiting at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and at the Park Avenue Armory as a part of their “Culture in a Changing America” curation series. OWNED had its television premiere in February of 2022 as a part of “Independent Lens” curation on PBS.

OWNED also brought with it a new collaboration with animator and artist, Arthur Jones, who provided all the animations and motion graphics for the film. After completing OWNED, Arthur invited Giorgio to collaborate on his next project, Feels Good Man, a documentary feature about the creator of Pepe the Frog. The film premiered at Sundance 2020 and won the Special Jury Prize for Emerging Filmmaker, eventually going on to win an Emmy for Outstanding Research in a Feature Documentary. 

Giorgio also directed a documentary-short for Rome Prize-winning artist Mary Ellen Carroll, entitled ​My Death is Pending...Because.

Giorgio continues to work on architectural projects, collaborating primarily with his former graduate school classmate Mary Casper.