The Italian artist Giovanna Casotto grew up with her grandparents in Desio, a northern suburb of Milan, and after leaving school studied history at Milan University. She never finished her degree though, getting married and having two daughters instead. Two of her main interests were art and kink, then in its early days, and in 1994, at a foot-fetish meeting, she met the caricaturist Franco Saudelli. It was the perfect collaboration; she began to pose for him, and they soon started to work together on erotic comics.

For the next three years Giovanna Casotto attended the Scuola Internazionale di Comics in Milan, after which she published some short stories for L’Intrepido together with Mauro Muroni. At the same time she continued to collaborate with Saudelli, and together they developed a highly productive way of working – she and Franco took photographs of each other, then Giovanna traced them, resulting in her trademark realistic style. In this way much of her work is autobiographical; she is the main character in many of her own stories.

The Casotto–Saudelli stories became a mainstay of the erotic magazine Selen produced by Selen Edicións, and when Selen closed down they produced similar work for the monthly magazine Blue, published by Coniglio Editore. It was not long before her work was noticed by publishers outside Italy, and by 2000 she was being published in Britain by Desire magazine, in the USA by Eros Comix, and in France by Dynamite. Many of her storylines were created with Franco Saudelli, though she also liked working with Pasquale Petrolo, who writes under the pseudonym Lillo.

By 2020, after producing more than twenty volumes of erotic comics, Giovanna Casotto decided that enough was enough, and she was more interested in developing her painting. To date two volumes of her watercolours have been published, and she has found a new audience and market to add to her comic book following.