John Giorno (born 1936) is a North American poet and performance artist. He founded the artist collective Giorno Poetry Systems and coined its mass communication experiment Dial-A-Poem. He became prominent as the subject of Andy Warhol's film Sleep. He is also an AIDS activist and fundraiser.

Career

Giorno was born in New York. He graduated from Columbia University in 1958. In 1962, while in his early 20s he worked in New York as a stockbroker. In 1962 he met Andy Warhol during Warhol's first New York Pop Art solo exhibit at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery, who became an important influence for Giorno's developments on poetry, performance and recordings. Giorno and Warhol are said to have remained very close until 1964, after which time their meetings were rare. Their relationship was revived somewhat in the last year before Warhol's death.

In 1968, Giorno founded Giorno Poetry Systems in order to connect poetry to new audiences, using innovative technology. This intuition turned out to be very influential on later approaches to poetry, like Spoken Word, Slam readings (Slam Poetry) and the use of technology as an aid for artistic purposes. Some of the poets and artists who recorded or collaborated with Giorno Poetry Systems were William Burroughs, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Mapplethorpe.

In 1982 he made the album Who Are You Staring At? with Glenn Branca and is prominently featured in Ron Mann's 1982 film Poetry in Motion.

In addition to his collaborations with William Burroughs, Giorno has produced a number of albums, tapes, videos and books.

In 2007 he appeared in Nine Poems in Basilicata, a film directed by Antonello Faretta based on his poems and his performances. In addition to his solo performances in live poetry shows, he has collaborated since 2005 in some music-poetry shows with Spanish rock singer and composer Javier Colis.