Anne Donnelly is an Irish artist who has lived in Italy for over forty years. She was born in Belfast and grew up in the midlands of Ireland in Co. Carlow. She studied first at the College of Art in Dublin in 1953, then a year later at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Madrid. She finally went on to study at the Ecole Julienne in Paris in 1956 where she met her husband, acclaimed Italian writer Carlo Mazzantini.