Lucia Ianniello is an Italian trumpeter and composer, born in Nocera Inferiore in the province of Salerno. She came to the trumpet relatively late, after an earlier path that took her to Siena for a degree in economics before music became her focus; a serious eye illness in the interim pushed her to reorder her priorities toward the instrument. She trained at the L. Refice Conservatory in Frosinone, an environment she has described as open to jazz avant-garde study, and later took musicology coursework at Rome's Sapienza University after relocating to the capital, where she has lived and worked for most of her recording career. She is regularly described in the Italian press as one of the first women to establish herself as a jazz trumpeter in Italy, and has performed with the all-female Orchestra del 41° Parallelo.

Her recording career began in 2015 with her debut album Maintenant (SLAM Productions), a quintet session with vocalist Diana Torti, guitarist Giuseppe La Spina and keyboardist Paolo Tombolesi, drawing partly on material by Los Angeles saxophonist and composer Jesse Sharps. The connection to Sharps opened onto a deeper research thread: a 1987 interview in which the late pianist and community organizer Horace Tapscott described his philosophy of music as "contributive and not competitive" led Ianniello to write a thesis on Tapscott and study Steve Isoardi's biography of him, and that research became the basis of her second album, Live At Acuto Jazz (2017, SLAM Productions), recorded live in the Church of San Sebastiano in Acuto, Lazio. The album is a tribute to Tapscott and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, built on compositions by Tapscott, Jesse Sharps, Michael Session and Fuasi Abdul-Khaliq alongside her own writing, performed by a quintet without drums (Ianniello on trumpet and objects, Diana Torti on voice, Andrea Polinelli on saxophones and flute, Paolo Tombolesi on keyboards and Cristina Patrizi on electric bass) that relies on gestural cues rather than a steady beat to hold its collective improvisation together.

In January 2022 she released My One and Only Planet (Freely Records), a quintet recording made under pandemic conditions with musicians tracking remotely between Philadelphia and several Italian towns - guitarist Roberto Cervi, keyboardist Paolo Tombolesi, electric bassist Mario Mazzenga and drummer Grant Calvin Weston - built around environmental and ecological themes. Her third studio album as a leader, Keep Left and Go Straight South (2024, Filibusta Records), grew out of a different process: melodic ideas recorded on her phone while walking the coastline near Terracina, developed afterward at the piano with her quartet of Paolo Tombolesi (keyboards), Roberto Cervi (guitar) and Alessandro Forte (drums). The album is entirely her own compositions and the first record on which she also sings and writes lyrics, including a track sung in Neapolitan, and it addresses migration, human rights and Southern Italian identity as both a geographic and a moral idea.

Alongside her music, Ianniello works as a journalist, writing for the monthly Left and its website Left.it, a separate professional track from her performing and recording career.

Ianniello's own catalogue sits consistently inside jazz by genre: all three of her Discogs-documented albums are tagged Jazz, with Contemporary Jazz as the recurring style descriptor. Her sound draws on a chamber-jazz instinct for space and interplay - Live At Acuto Jazz is built entirely without drums, letting silence and gesture do the work a rhythm section would elsewhere - alongside a persistent avant-garde lineage traced directly back to Horace Tapscott's Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and its ethic of collective, non-competitive music-making. That research also opens her music toward wider ethno-jazz and world-music textures: wordless vocal lines used as an instrumental color rather than a lyric vehicle on her earlier records, and, on Keep Left and Go Straight South, a turn toward Mediterranean and Southern Italian identity that includes singing in Neapolitan dialect for the first time.

She names trumpeters Jon Hassell, Nils Petter Molvaer and Tomasz Stanko as stylistic touchstones, and cites Alison Balsom's influence on her tone and articulation. Reviewers of Keep Left and Go Straight South have described her trumpet playing as measured and restrained rather than torrential, delivering its effect through control more than volume, set inside a quartet sound that Jazz Convention's review characterized as looking past traditional jazz language toward the timbral range of contemporary rock, rap and folk music without leaving jazz behind as its foundation.