Abel Ferrara was born in 1951 in the Morris Park section of the Bronx. After living in this Italian-American neighborhood and receiving an early Roman Catholic education, his family moved to Peekskill, New York. It was there, in high school, that Ferrara met Nicholas St. John, who would eventually become his primary screenwriter and filmmaking partner, and Jack McIntyre, another longtime collaborator (as boys, they’d shoot Super 8 films). Ferrara attended Rockland Community College and, later, Purchase College, where he met his first producer, Mary Kane.

Ferrara first used a 35mm film camera shooting a short film with a BBC crew as an exchange student in England. Post-university, in 1975, Ferrara’s group of collaborators moved their filmmaking process to Manhattan and began filming on the streets of New York, starting with 9 Lives and then, in 1979, The Driller Killer (when Ferrara first met Ken Kelsch, his longtime director of photography, and they began their theatrical film career). In The Driller Killer, Ferrara also plays the protagonist, a young painter from New York whose schizophrenia leads to the violence that inspired a genre.

In 1981, Nicholas St. John wrote Ms. 45, the story of a young mute seamstress (played by Zoë Lund) who decides to take revenge on her aggressors after being raped. In 1984, the group shot a feature film in L.A. and New York titled Fear City, with Melanie Griffith and Tom Berenger.

Ferrara returned to New York City to work on his second documentary, Chelsea on the Rocks, out of the iconic 23rd Street Hotel. In April 2011, Ferrara and Dafoe shot their third feature together, 4:44 Last Day on Earth, with Ferrara’s then-companion Shanyn Leigh while working again with cinematographer Ken Kelsch, editor Anthony Redman, and designer Frank DeCurtis. 4:44 Last Day on Earth is set during the course of the last 24 hours before a biblical and ecological apocalypse. The film went on to compete at the 68th Venice International Film Festival in September 2011, and followed with IFC releasing it in the United States. In April 2013, Ferrara – continuing his collaboration with Vincent Maraval and Wild Bunch, responsible for many of his works beginning in the late 1990s – began shooting a fictionalized version of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sexual assault case titled Welcome to New York, starring Gérard Depardieu and Jacqueline Bisset. It was immediately followed by a second Ferrara-esque biopic, Pasolini, with Willem Dafoe playing the great Italian provocateur. Filmed in actual locations in Rome, and photographed by Stefano Falivene (Mary’s director of photography), Pasolini depicts the last days in Pier Paolo’s life. Edited by longtime collaborator Fabio Nunziata, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

At this point, living in Italy, Ferrara decided to follow Pasolini with three documentaries. Padre Pio, an investigation into the life of the southern Italian saint, was followed by Alive in France, a concert film reuniting Ferrara with Joe Delia (the composer for much of Ferrara’s work) and actor Paul Hipp for a sober musical tour of Toulose and Paris following a French retrospective of Ferrara’s films. (The film also stars Cristina Chiriac and Ferrara’s and Chiriac’s daughter, Anna.) Piazza Vittorio came next, premiering at the Venice and New York film festivals in 2016, a treatise on immigration and life in the famous Italian square of Bicycle Thief fame. In 2019, Rome hosted the fifth collaboration between Ferrara and Dafoe with Tommaso. The film deals with the life of an American artist living in Rome, again stars Ferrara’s family (Cristina Chiriac and Anna Ferrara), and was photographed by Peter Zeitlinger.

Siberia reunited Ferrara with Diana Phillips, who produced with Marta Donzelli and Gregorio Paonessa. Working again with Phil Nielson – Ferraro’s longtime second-unit director – photographed by Stefano Falivene, and edited by Fabio Nunziata, Siberia is also Ferrara’s third film in partnership with Michael Weber of Match Factory and Christos Konstantakopoulos. The film, starring Willem Dafoe in an Alice in Wonderland-like study of the nature of dreams, memory, and the extremities of man in nature, expresses the more dreamlike side of Ferrara’s work. It was co-written with longtime collaborator Chris Zois and shot in the Italian Alps, the Mexican desert, and the soundstages and forests of Bavaria.