Italo Scanga, sculptor, painter, printmaker, ceramist, and teacher, was born in Lago, Calabria, Italy on 6 June 1932. As a world war became imminent, his mother attempted to follow her husband, who had moved to the U.S. a couple years prior. In 1939, American troops invaded Italy on the day of their planned departure, forcing them to stay in Lago for the duration of the war. During this time Scanga worked as a cabinetmaker's apprentice and studied with a sculptor who created busts of saints. When the war drew to a close in 1945, the family resumed preparations for their move to the United States and, in 1947, they reunited with Scanga's father in Point Marion, Pennsylvania.

His family moved to Garden City, Michigan in 1950 and Scanga began working in the evenings on an assembly line at General Motors. Between 1951 and 1953, Scanga studied at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit. He also graduated from high school in 1953, at twenty-one-years of age due to language difficulties, and immediately joined the U.S. Army. He was stationed in Austria in the armored tanks division from 1953 to 1956. After he returned to Michigan, he enrolled at Michigan State University in East Lansing, where he received his BA in 1960 and his MFA in sculpture in 1961. That same year, he began teaching sculpture at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, with Leo Steppat. Scanga also taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Pennsylvania State University in State College, Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and the University of California in San Diego after moving to La Jolla, California in 1978.

Scanga’s work is represented in museum collections around the world, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; the Museum of the Northwest, La Connor, Washington; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Minnesota; the Guggenheim Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Oakland Museum of California; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and the Albertina, Vienna, Austria.

Scanga’s online bio enumerates at least 100 solo exhibitions of his work from 1969 to 2006. In 2023, the Museum of Northwest Art in La Connor, Washington presented the exhibition, Permanent Immigrant: Italo Scanga in the Dale and Leslie Chihuly Collection.

Italo Scanga died on 27 July 2001 in Pacific Beach, a neighborhood of San Diego, California.