Gianna Mazzeo

Who is Gianna Mazzeo?

Gianna Mazzeo is an Italian-Australian queer writer and director based in Amsterdam, working across drama, black comedy, and feminist adult cinema. Born on February 21, 1994, in Melbourne, Australia, Gianna has built a career defined by a sharp cinematic eye, a passion for authentic storytelling, and an instinct for finding new angles on culture, sexuality, and the female experience. Her mainstream work speaks for itself. Gianna's films have screened at Academy Award, BAFTA, and Canadian Screen Award qualifying festivals, including Inside Out Toronto and the Scottish Queer International Film Festival. Her documentary short The History of the Carabiner won the Audience Award for Best Short at Inside Out Toronto and received an Australian Directors' Guild nomination. Her debut short, Miss Pisces, was selected as a NOWNESS Pick.

Her entry into adult cinema was something she'd been quietly moving toward for years. Whenever she watched mainstream porn, she found herself drifting, not into the moment, but into director mode. "I'd imagine alternative angles, a more intentional build-up to the sex, keeping clothes on a little longer, undressing performers more slowly, bringing in more intimacy, and using fewer explicit close-ups. When you catch yourself thinking like a director, constantly reimagining how you'd reshape a sex scene, instead of feeling turned on like you're supposed to, it feels like a pretty clear sign from the universe that it's time to stop imagining and start creating." When a call-out for queer female guest directors for ERIKALUST crossed her path, she knew the moment had finally arrived. On set, Gianna works in a way that surprises even herself.

A confessed control freak, she says with us, she discovered a different kind of directing, one that prioritizes performer pleasure over strict choreography, and hands authorial license back to the people in front of the camera as co-creators of the scene. "It was really special for me to work in a way that forced me to relinquish some control", she says. The result is something you can feel on screen: performers who are genuinely comfortable, genuinely present, and genuinely enjoying themselves. For Gianna, feminist porn is a meaningful counter-movement to everything that's wrong with the mainstream. "The first thing that springs to mind when I think about porn is the sound of dramatic fake moaning and 10-minute blowjob scenes", she says. "So I'm so elated and proud to be a part of this feminist porn movement, spearheaded by Erika Lust, that is doing so much meaningful work to dismantle the antiquated approach of mainstream porn in favour of centring cinematic, artistic, and realistic pleasure created by diverse voices." Her dream? To keep going. Gianna loves the epic feature films ERIKALUST creates — like The Wedding— and her ambition is to one day direct a feature-length porn film for us. Something big, cinematic, and entirely her own.

Watch Gianna Mazzeo's erotic films on ERIKALUST

In My Hot Italian Summer, Gianna Mazzeo's debut adult film for ERIKALUST tyga Dares plays a queer screenwriter who escapes to a remote Italian island hoping for silence, focus, and enough distance to finally write. But under the summer sun, distraction arrives in the form of Beatrice Segreti, magnetic, Mediterranean, sunlit, and impossible to ignore. What begins as a dreamy, cinematic fantasy slowly becomes something impossible to resist. Gianna draws consciously from the language of Italian cinema, the woman observed hanging laundry, walking the beach, moving through the heat — but then flips it entirely. As Gianna puts it: "we give this ethereal fantasy woman agency, sending her right into the backyard of our main character to have an intense, empowered, lesbian experience that sees our female characters the owners of their desire, not the objects of others' desire." A queer summer romance shot entirely through the female gaze, where the one being watched finally looks back, and the fantasy reaches for you first.