Cristina Zavalloni was born November 21, 1973, in Bologna, into a musical family: her father, billed professionally as Paolo Zavallone (born Paolo Zavalloni, 1932, Riccione), was a bandleader, singer and multi-instrumentalist who scored an international disco hit in 1977 as "El Pasador" with "Amada Mia, Amore Mio," conducted the 1978 Sanremo Music Festival, and arranged for the Zecchino d'Oro children's song contest from 1989 to 2001. Father and daughter recorded a duet together, "Papà ha la bua," when Cristina was a child; it resurfaced on a 2023 reissue of his catalog, the same year he died. Zavalloni herself studied voice, bel canto and composition at Bologna's Conservatorio di Musica "Giovan Battista Martini," and trained for several years in classical and modern dance alongside her music studies.

Her recorded output opens on two tracks that would define the rest of her career side by side. In 1993 she began what became a three-decade partnership with Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, who wrote a run of major works for her voice — Passeggiata in tram in America e ritorno, La Passione (2002, later recorded with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project), Letter from Cathy, Inanna and Racconto dall'Inferno, the last earning her a Diapason d'Or in 2008. Andriessen went on to create the title role of Dante for her in his opera La Commedia (2013) and the role of Anaïs Nin in Anaïs (2010), and she has performed his music at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Teatro alla Scala and the Concertgebouw. At almost the same time, her jazz identity took shape in Bologna's small-group scene: a 1998 recording billed to the Cristina Zavalloni "Open Quartet," Come Valersi Non Servilmente di Bertolt Brecht (CMC), and 1999's duo record with pianist Stefano De Bonis, Scoiattoli Confusi, both rooted in free improvisation and contemporary jazz.

The quartet lineup solidified around bassist Antonio Borghini and trombonist Gianluca Petrella for When You Go Yes Is Yes! (2004, Felmay), and Zavalloni's name-only leader catalog proper began with Idea (2006, EGEA), a Discogs-tagged Contemporary Jazz session adding clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi and drummer Cristiano Calcagnile to the same rhythm section. Solidago followed in 2009 on the same label, largely with the same band. In between, 2008's Tilim-bom, a duo record with pianist Andrea Rebaudengo, sits on the classical side of her catalog. La donna di cristallo (2012, EGEA), billed to Cristina Zavalloni & Radar Band, introduced a new, long-running partnership with alto saxophonist and arranger Cristiano Arcelli — a relationship she has since named, alongside Andriessen and Rebaudengo, as one of the three foundational relationships of her career.

2014 brought her highest-profile jazz release: The Soul Factor (Via Veneto Jazz), a co-billed tribute to Aretha Franklin recorded with pianist Uri Caine and an American rhythm section. The same year she also released Special Dish (Musica Jazz, reissued 2015 on Encore Jazz), a working quartet record with Arcelli, drummer Alessandro Paternesi and bassist Daniele Mencarelli, following it with Special Moon (2017). Her partnership with Caine extended beyond that studio record into live performance: she sang in the Uri Caine Ensemble's Moonsongs, Caine's jazz reworking of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, including a documented performance at Vienna's Konzerthaus on October 17, 2012, marking the piece's centenary, alongside vocalist Sadiq Bey, violinist Joyce Hammann, clarinetist Chris Speed, guitarist Nguyên Lê and drummer Jim Black. The same period saw her continue recording in explicitly classical contexts, including Salvatore Sciarrino's Altri Volti e Nuovi 2 (2017, Decca) with the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto.

For The Living (2020, Encore Classical Music & Jazz), made with Norwegian producer Jan Bang and guitarist Eivind Aarset alongside Arcelli, keyboardist Simone Graziano and bassist Francesco Ponticelli, became what Zavalloni herself, in a Musica Jazz interview, called a turning point in her career — a deliberately spare, "single color" record after years of denser arranging. PopOFF! (2021, Tǔk Music) reunited her with Arcelli for a jazz reworking of songs from the Zecchino d'Oro children's song contest, arranged for strings and horns alongside trumpeter Paolo Fresu, and Parlami Di Me (2021, EGEA), with ClaraEnsemble's strings, brought Mirabassi back into her band. Her most recent work has moved toward spare duo settings: Twisted (2023) with tuba and serpent player Michel Godard, and Lontanissimo (2023) with pianist Manuel Magrini, both Discogs-tagged Avant-Garde Jazz. Since 2017 she has also taught jazz singing and improvisation at Rome's Saint Louis College of Music, and created "Effemeridi Musicali," music programming broadcast on RAI3.

Zavalloni's own account of her work treats jazz and contemporary classical music as a single continuous practice rather than two careers run in parallel — in her own words, in the Musica Jazz interview cited above, "le differenze mi interessano poco" ("differences interest me very little"). The discography bears that out literally: her Discogs-documented leader and co-leader catalog splits close to evenly between releases tagged Jazz (Idea, Solidago, The Soul Factor, Special Dish, Special Moon, PopOFF!, Parlami Di Me, Twisted, Lontanissimo) and a body of concurrent, often higher-visibility classical and new-music work — three decades composing and performing with Louis Andriessen, two created opera roles, a Diapason d'Or, and premieres with the London Sinfonietta, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and conductor Marco Angius. This profile treats her honestly as both: a working jazz vocalist with a real, ongoing leader catalog, sideman relationships across a wide swath of the Italian jazz scene, and a jazz-specific teaching post, who also happens to be one of contemporary classical music's most active vocal interpreters. Her Uri Caine relationship captures the overlap precisely — a straight jazz co-leader album (The Soul Factor) on one side, and, on the other, singing in Caine's own jazz-idiom reworking of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, a piece that is itself a document of jazz musicians openly re-reading the classical repertoire rather than a classical performance in any conventional sense.

Her stated influences run from bel canto technique (via her conservatory training) through free improvisation to popular song, and her working bands favor small, mixed acoustic-string-and-reed textures — Mirabassi's clarinet, Arcelli's saxophones, ClaraEnsemble's strings — over a conventional rhythm-section-plus-horns jazz combo, a chamber-scale approach that carries through both her jazz-tagged records and her Andriessen and Sciarrino performances alike. Rome's Saint Louis College of Music, where she has taught jazz voice since 2017, describes her in its own faculty biography as "one of the most original and fascinating figures" on the Italian scene, comparing her to Ella Fitzgerald and Cathy Berberian — a characterization from her own teaching institution, reported here as such rather than as this profile's independent judgment.