Leonor Fini (30 August 1907 – 18 January 1996) was an Argentine-Italian surrealist painter, designer, illustrator, and author, known for her depictions of powerful and erotic women.

She also came to know Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Picasso, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, and Salvador Dalí.

[7] Though Fini is part of the pre-war generation of Parisian artists often overlooked in favour of male contemporaries, she was very important in the Surrealist movement.

[11] Fini worked for Elsa Schiaparelli in the late thirties and early forties and designed the bottle for the perfume "Shocking", basing the shape on Mae West's torso.

[12] Fini networked into theatre circles when she started taking on costume design projects in the 1930s as a source of extra income.

In 1959, Fini made a fairy tale-inspired painting called Les Sorcières for the Mexican actress, María Félix.

[14] She also designed the costumes for two films: Renato Castellani's Romeo and Juliet (1954) and John Huston's A Walk with Love and Death (1968).

A 1986 retrospective at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris featured over 260 of her works in a variety of media including watercolours and drawings, theatre/costume designs, paintings and masks.

[17] The San Francisco Modern Museum of Art also featured her work in an exhibition entitled "Women, Surrealism, and Self-representation" in 1999.

Her friends included Jean Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico, and Alberto Moravia, Fabrizio Clerici and most of the other artists and writers inhabiting or visiting Paris.

She illustrated many works of classic authors and poets, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Shakespeare, as well as texts by new writers.

They were divorced after she met the Italian count Stanislao Lepri, who abandoned his diplomatic career shortly after meeting Fini and lived with her thereafter.

[23] Leonor Fini Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings by Richard Overstreet and Neil Zukerman was published in 2021 by Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich.