Francesca Valente lives and works between North America and Italy. For over thirty years, she brought the best of Italian culture to NorthAmerica, as director of the Italian Cultural Institutes of San Francisco, Toronto-Vancouver, Chicago, and Los Angeles and distinguished herself as a cultural mediator, art curator and translator. While in San Francisco in the early eighties she organized, among other major events in the Western United States, a unique exhibition of Leonardo Da Vinci's drapery studies (and the Salvator Mundi), once owned by Giorgio Vasari, entitled Leonardo’s Return to Vinci which travelled to eleven university museums starting in Berkeley and ending in Princeton (catalogue by Johnson Reprint, New York). She also presented the work of such twentieth century icons as Giorgio Morandi and Alberto Burri at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as well as the work of young emerging artists, such as Giuseppe Penone, among others. While posted in Rome, she was responsible for the Culture and Heritage Department at the UNESCO National Commission for Italy, co-curated the collection of contemporary art of La Farnesina (headquarters of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), and was appointed as the cultural liaison between the Ministry itself and the City of Venice. Once back in North America, she was responsible for the permanent installation of Enzo Cucchi's The Fountain of Italy in bronze and black granite at York University (1992) and showcased in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario works by Michelangelo Pistoletto, Remo Salvadori, Carla Accardi, as well as Giuseppe Capogrossi, Lucio Fontana Arnaldo Pomodoro, Sandro Chia, Giulio Paolini and Vettor Pisani at the IIC, often in collaboration with the Ydessa Hendeles gallery, the York Art Gallery and the Architecture and Design Gallery, University of Toronto. While in anglophone Canada, she was the project director of two multimedia festivals: Italy on Stage (1986) and Italy in Canada (1990-91). In her most recent post in Los Angeles, she coordinated the eight Italian Cultural Institutes of USA and Canada. In Los Angeles she conceived and organized a unique exhibition entitled: Leonardo da Vinci and Bill Viola, reviewed by Alessandra Farkas in Corriere della Sera, as well as exhibitions of Luigi Ontani, Mario Giacomelli, Nunzio, Liliana Moro, Frank Stella and Emilio Vedova. Alighiero Boetti designed a mosaic at the California State University, Northridge while Eliseo Mattiacci donated Eye of the Sky, his tribute to Galileo Galilei, to the University of California Sculpture Garden (UCLA). In 2011 she was invited by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to coordinate the 89 Italian Cultural Institutes throughout the world for the Padiglione Italia, Venice Biennale. Eighty nine videos were produced and shown at the Arsenale focusing on Italian artists living outside of Italy with music commissioned to Ennio Morricone, while 89 exhibitions took place world-wide, recorded by a bilingual catalogue, Lo stato dell'Arte / State of the Arts, published by Skira, Milan.
In 2015-16 she curated a solo photo exhibition of Ljubodrag Andric, Consonanze, at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice. Design installation by arch. Tobia Scarpa. In 2016-18 she curated an exhibition of 220 artists from Central and Eastern Canada and USA for Imago Mundi, L. Benetton Foundation, featured at Palazzo Loredan, Venice (Out of the Bush Garden) and at OCAD University Onsite gallery, Toronto (Great and North). In 2018-2023 she curated exhibitions of California artist Nancy Genn at Palazzo Ferro Fini (2018), Ca’ Pesaro Museum, Venice (2019), Marignana Arte, Venice (2021 and 2022-3) accompanied by bilingual catalogues and a lavishly illustrated monograph entitled Nancy Genn: Architecture from Within/Architetture interiori, published by Skira, Milan.

In 2020 and 2021 she was responsible for the first two editions of the Festival delle Arti in Todi featuring exhibitions by Gianfranco Gorgoni and Nancy Genn (2020) while the second centered on Beverly Pepper & Arnaldo Pomodoro (2021). Four monumental Stele in bronze were placed throughout the summer in Piazza del Popolo while five Sceptres can still be admired at Giardini Oberdan. Pomodoro's installations were complemented by a multimedia exhibition Labyr-Into. Dentro il labirinto di Arnaldo Pomodoro at Palazzo del Popolo and documented with bilingual catalogues. In 2023 she curated the first retrospective of Nancy Genn, Beyond the Grid, in an Italian museum, Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, representing the Pacific counterpart of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism exemplified by a solo exhibition of Michael Venezia in the same museum. Both shows were accompanied by a bilingual catalogue.

Over the years, she wrote over fifty catalogues on Italian art and translated into both languages essays, novels and poems such as Roman Poems by P.P. Pasolini along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Citylights, San Francisco (Introduction by Alberto Moravia), Rolls Royce and other Poems by Giorgio Bassani, Mercury Press, Toronto (Introduction by Northrop Frye), Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo/My Poems Will Not Change the World by Patrizia Cavalli; The Baffled Hunter/Il cacciatore sconcertato by Irving Layton, Compass Rose/Rosa dei Venti by P. K. Page, The Last Hieroglyph/Il geroglifico finale by Gwendolyn MacEwen and The Solitude of Strength/La Solitudine della Forza by Leonard Cohen, Longo Ed. Ravenna. She also translated Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry/Agghiacciante Simmetria, Longanesi, Milan, The Double Vision/La duplice Visione, Marsilio, Venice, for which as awarded a fellowship by Canada Council and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to apply for a Master of Arts at the University of Toronto. She then translated Marshall McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride/La sposa meccanica (reviewed by Umberto Eco in L’Espresso), From Cliché to Architype/ Dal Cliché all’archetipo, The Global Village/Il villaggio globale, The Man and His Message/L'uomo e il suo messaggio, The Vanishing Point/ Il punto di fuga, Sugarco, Milan; Corrispondenza 1931-1979, Longanesi. Milan. As well as The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood, The Favourite Game by Leonard Cohen, Fat Woman by Leon Rooke, The Student of Weather/L’Apprendista del vento by Elizabeth Hay, Neri Pozza, Milan, short stories by Alice Monroe, Barry Callaghan and other Canadian, American and Australian authors, such as for instance, Frank Lloyd Wright's Essays, In the Cause of Architecture/Per la Causa dell’Architettura (Introduction by Paolo Portoghesi), Gangemi, Rome, and Wim Wenders & Mary Zournazi, Inventing Peace/Inventare la Pace, Bompiani, Milan.

She recently published in bilingual edition Rita Levi-Montalcini. Pioneer and Ambassador of Science /Rita Levi-Montalcini. Pioniera e ambasciatrice della scienza and A.P. Giannini. The People's Banker/A.P. Giannini. Il banchiere di tutti, Mentoris Project, Los Angeles (reviewed by Gian Antonio Stella in Corriere della Sera and by Marco Onado in Sole 24 Ore).