Décio Pignatari was born in 1927 in São Paulo, Brazil. Pignatari is a poet ("language designer"), graphic artist, and a professor of information theory. Along with Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, he co-founded the Noigandres Group in 1952, and co-authored the "pilot plan for concrete poetry" in 1958. In 1954, Pignatari visited Eugen Gomringer in Switzerland - a meeting that helped launch "concrete poetry" (the name suggested for the new poetry by the Brazilians) as an international movement. His poems and essays have appeared in all the issues of the avant-garde magazines Noigandres and Invenção (1952 to 1962). His work was published in the collection "Poesia Pois é Poesia - Po&tc" in 1986. He is coauthor, with Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, of "Teoria da Poesia Concreta" (1965), and has published translations of Ezra Pound's "Cantos" (with the de Campos brothers), Dante, Shakespeare and others. His creative work includes two collections of experimental prose, "O Rosto da Memória" (1986) and "Panteros" (1992).