Luigi Lucioni was born in Malnate, Italy. In 1906, Luigi's father, Angelo, left the family and departed for the United States where he worked toward the goal of bringing his wife and family to his new country. Luigi immigrated to the United States with his mother and sisters in 1911. At the age of fifteen, he won a competition that allowed him to attend Cooper Union. In 1920, he studied with William Auerbach Levy at the National Academy of Design, and in 1924 he was the recipient of a Tiffany Foundation scholarship. The scholarship gave him an opportunity to travel back to his homeland to study Italian primitives.

In 1929, he spent part of each year in Stowe, Vermont painting still lifes and landscapes of the hills and barns and in 1939 he purchased a farmhouse near Manchester. In the 1930s, while European modernism was gaining momentum in the United States, Lucioni continued with realism. Lucioni taught at the Art Students' League in New York, and maintained a studio in Washington Square. He was a member of the Society of American Etchers, the Southern Vermont Artists, and was elected full academician in the National Academy of Art.

His work is represented in the collections of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, El Paso Museum of Art, Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University, High Museum of Art, Joslyn Art Museum, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Toledo Museum of Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Worcester Art Museum.