Cosimo Cavallaro (Canadian, b.1962) is an filmmaker, sculptor, and performance artist. Cavallaro was born in Montreal, but raised in both Canada and Italy. He attended art schools in Canada, Italy, and the United States before setting up a sculptor shop in Montreal in the early 1980s.



Cavallaro eventually fell into film directing when a friend asked him to help on a movie set. He soon became a full-time production designer; he worked first on features and commercials, and eventually moved onto directing. As a director, Cavallaro won numerous awards, including the Director of the Year Award in Canada, and the 1990 Canadian Film Festival Award for Best Video of the Year. In 1995, he moved to New York. While there, he began to focus more on creating art, especially performance pieces.



The artist is known for his numerous installation pieces involving real cheese and other food products, including a performance in which he covered the iconic 1960s model Twiggy in spray cheese, and one in which he covered the inside of a New York City hotel room entirely with melted cheese. Cavallaro’s cheese installations have inspired features in hundreds of media outlets throughout the world, including, but not limited to, The New York Times, Contemporary Visual Arts Magazine, CNN, Global Japan Television, People, BBC, Harper’s Bazaar, the Associated Press, and the Fox News channel.