Federico Fellini, (1920 -1993), Italian film director who was one of the most celebrated and singular filmmakers of the period after World War II. Influenced early in his career by the Neorealist movement, he developed his own distinctive methods that superimposed dreamlike or hallucinatory imagery upon ordinary situations. He added vastly to the vocabulary of the cinema and pioneered a personal style of filmmaking now integral to its practice.
The son of a traveling salesman who sold foodstuffs and a mother who believed that, in marrying beneath her, she betrayed her links to Roman nobility, Fellini grew up believing he belonged in Rome. In the late 1930s he moved there with his mother and brother.

In 1944 Fellini met director Roberto Rossellini and became one of a team of writers for Roma, città aperta (1945; Open City or Rome, Open City), a pioneer film of Neorealism. Fellini’s contribution to the screenplay earned him his first Oscar nomination.

Fellini’s quest for a more personal style, which often verged on the fantastic, alienated Neorealist purists. His directorial debut, Luci del varietà (1950; Variety Lights), made in collaboration with Lattuada, is set in a traveling variety show.
By mingling dream and reality, autobiography and fantasy, and by using his own creative and personal problems as subject matter, Fellini also pioneered, in Otto e mezzo, a category of psychoanalytical cinema that inspired many and is still being explored. His films were nominated for 23 Academy Awards and won eight. Fellini also received a career achievement Oscar in 1993, the Golden Lion career award from the Venice Film Festival in 1985, and dozens of prizes from the world’s most prestigious film festivals.