Eduarda Emilia Maino, known as Dadamaino, was born in Milan in 1930. She studied medicine at university, before deciding to pursue an artistic career in the late 1950s. In 1957 Dadamaino befriended the artist Piero Manzoni who introduced her to the Milanese avant-garde circle of artists which included Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi, and in the following year she produced her first body of work, Volumi, punctured canvases that were strongly inspired by Lucio Fontana's Buchi. In 1959, Dadamaino joined the group founded by her Milanese artist friends, called Azimuth.

In the 1960s, Dadamaino's art became focused on the concept of movement. She created Optical-dynamic Objects in 1961, works that gave an illusion of movement through visual effects of aluminium plates pasted on board; and Componibili  in 1966, comprising small cut-out squares that created dynamic possibilities when threaded onto a string.

Towards the end of the 1960s, Dadamaino's artistic production saw an increased focus on colour, and she created the substantial work Ricerca del Colore, in which she scrupulously investigated the chromatic potential of combining different shades. The 1970s saw a significant shift in Dadamaino's art; in this decade she concentrated on signs and symbols as artistic subject. In the works Alfabeto della mente (Alphabet of the Mind) and I fatti della vita (The Facts of Life) she created an alphabet-like system of characters which she depicted repeatedly in each work. The latter of these was exhibited in a solo show at the 1980 Venice Biennale, and she exhibited again at the Biennale of 1990.

Throughout her career, Dadamaino exhibited widely, and major retrospectives were held at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan in 1983, and at the Bochum Museum, Germany in 2000. She died in Milan in 2004, and today her artworks are in numerous international collections including the Pompidou Centre, Paris, the Tate Modern, London, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.