Roberto Polillo was born in Milan in 1946. His father Arrigo was a critic, historian, jazz promoter and director of the magazine Musica Jazz. Precisely as a result of his father's activity, from a very young age Roberto began to know and use photography. From 1962 to 1974 he took pictures of over a hundred concerts in Italy performed by some of the major jazz artists of the time.
These shots have been published many times in magazines, books and CDs, as well as on the Internet. His photographic book Swing, Bop & Free (2006) presents a selection of images from over 100 musicians active during the Sixties, all pictures are accompanied with texts and quotations from his father Arrigo and other authors.
However, starting in the 1970s, it was the innovative world of computer science that traced the professional life of Roberto Polillo, who became an entrepreneur, consultant and manager in the software and IT services sector, as well as co-founder and CEO of Etnoteam, a group of IT and Internet service companies, including INET.
At the same time, Polillo was also a university lecturer for 41 years (from 1974 to 2015), first in software engineering and then on the Internet, holding various courses at the Università Statale di Milano and the Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca.
During the years spent collaborating with Etnoteam group, Polillo continued to practice photography only occasionally and for enjoyment. He resumed practicing it more widely in 2003, after ending his managerial activities.
Continuing in some way the photographic experience linked to the world of entertainment, he initially dedicated himself to photographing street artist festivals and then devoted himself extensively to travel photography. Travelling, in fact, is another of Roberto Polillo's great interests, to date he has visited over 60 countries. These trips have become more frequent with the rise of digital photography in the early 2000s. 
During his second trip to Morocco, Polillo accidentally experimented with what would later become known as the ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) technique: through a lucky "error" in the setting of the camera, the image is characterized by a blurred effect. The pictures are taken with long exposure times by moving the camera during the shot, creating fascinating and painting like images, very different from traditional travel photographs and also from the analogical black and white photographs Polillo had taken of jazz musicians. This inspired a new project called Impressions of the World, an artistic adventure that took the artist to over 25 countries, from Venice to the Middle and Far East, North America and Central America. In another project known as Future & The City, Roberto Polillo explores visual hypotheses about the cities of the future.
After the death of his wife Patricia, in 2014, photography became Polillo's main activity, as shown by the strong increase in exhibition activity and the publication of various photographic books. Within the Impressions of the World projects he has so far published the books Visions of Venice (2016) and Future & The City (2017). The images have been exhibited in various solo exhibitions in Venice, Milan, Trieste and Paris and presented at important art fairs in Italy and the United States. In 2016 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the EBA - European Business Association as part of the European Business Award Competition.
Today, Roberto Polillo lives between Milan, Rome and Miami. He splits his time between managing the P&R Foundation, he founded in 2016, and his intense commitment to travel photography. 

Roberto Polillo photographed by Stefano Molaschi, 2018