Born in Buffalo, NY, Gallo moved to NYC in the late 70s and immediately became embroiled in the "Downtown New Wave" scene. He simultaneously began making Super 8 films (including the 1977 short "If You Feel Froggy, Jump"), painting and sculpting (with showings at galleries in NYC) and pursuing a career as a musician. (Gallo played in several bands such as Jean-Michel Basquiat's Gray and his own Bohack). After developing the hobby of motorcycle racing, Gallo decided to pursue an acting career to gain health insurance. Eric Mitchell not only cast him in "The Way It Is, or Eurydice of the Avenues" (1983) but also tapped him to compose the film's score, which earned Gallo the 1984 Berlin Film Festival Award for Best Music.

But it was not until the 90s that Gallo's acting career truly flourished. He first garnered attention as Johnny Depp's friend, an aspiring actor who sells cars, in Emir Kusturica's "Arizona Dream" (1992) before appearing as the policeman who interrogates Winona Ryder in "The House of the Spirits" (1993). The actor has appeared in three Claire Denis films, including a turn as a US soldier in the made-for-French TV "U.S. Go Home" (1994) and an appearance in the award-winning "Nenette et Boni" (1996). Further displaying his range and versatility, Gallo played a Protestant minister in Rebecca Miller's "Angela" (1995), one of a trio of inept would-be criminals in the fine comedy "Palookaville" (1995) and the volatile younger brother in a crime family whose death is the centerpiece for Abel Ferrara's "The Funeral" (1996). Continuing his busy streak, he was cast as yet another criminal in Kiefer Sutherland's directorial debut "Truth or Consequences, N.M." (1997), had a pivotal role alongside Dermot Mulroney, Mary-Louise Parker and Ellen DeGeneres in Roland Joffe's comedic thriller "Goodbye Lover" (also 1997).

Somewhat of a Renaissance man, Gallo has simultaneously pursued careers in art, music and film. A self-proclaimed hustler and hobbyist, he chose to act more for its tangible rewards than to fulfill any creative urges, which may explain the uniqueness of his screen presence. A Gallo performance is filled with a mercurial, carnal power. Although he has often appeared in off-beat and little seen roles, there is no denying his abilities. He all but stole "Arizona Dream" from his better-known co-stars (Depp, Faye Dunaway, Lili Taylor and Jerry Lewis). In both "The House of Spirits" and "The Perez Family", Gallo provided a seemingly authentic Latin whereas co-stars like Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons in the former and Anjelica Huston in the latter appeared miscast. To date, his idiosyncratic screen presence (captured in print by Richard Avedon in the Calvin Klein advertisements) was best displayed with his performances as Russ, the bumbling mastermind, in "Palookaville" and as Johnny, the charming, leftist mobster, in "The Funeral".

The actor broke big onto the public consciousness when stepped behind the cameras to make his feature writing and directing debut with the semi-autobiographical "Buffalo 66" (1998), in which he also starred alongside Christina Ricci. The film, co-written with Alison Bagnall, was praised for its intimate and idiosyncratic--and oft-amusing--portrait of a recently released convict and hibitual loser (Gallo), who absconds with a teen Lolita from a tap dance school (Ricci) and presents her as his new wife to his bizarre, hyper-judgmental parents (Anjelica Huston and Ben Gazarra) in Buffalo. The film was well-received and praised for its unique, off-kilter brio and strangely appealing narcissism, though Gallo notoriously took it upon himself to personally phone and harass critics who panned the film and found it bleak, egocentric and self-indulgent. Ultimatley, both the movie and Gallo were the recipients of several awards nominations and victories; and, as an extremely low-budget indie, it also performed decently at the box office.

After appearing as an actor in a long string of undistinguished films--such as the crime-thriller "Cord" (2000) opposite Daryl Hannah and Jennifer Tilly--after his "Buffalo 66" successes, Gallo proved that he had not forgotten how to stir up controversy on his next effort as writer-director-star, "The Brown Bunny" (2004), an avant garde outing that featured the actor as a motorcycle racer driving between engagments, feuling up at an endless array of gas stations, and pining for his lost love (Chloe Sevigny, Gallo's real-life ex-girlfriend)--all fairly tepid stuff, save for one controversial sequence in which Gallo's character receives oral sex from Sevigny, shot in a near-full-frontal on-screen depiction in which it appears the sex act was real, performed in an extreme version of the Method. The film shocked audiences in its initial screening at Cannes in 2003, where Gallo explained: "I didn't include the sex scene to be controversial. I included it because I'm interested in the subject matter. It's a very complex scene. You never see how people actually look when in deep intimacy in contrast to what's happening emotionally or see how people act out dark pathologies." by the time of the film's release in 2004, trimmed by 25 minutes but still including the explicit oral sex sequence.

Off-screen the controversy continued: A billboard featuring the intimate act lasted on L.A.'s Sunset Strip for five days before being taken down after many locals complained. "My work is conceptual, intellectualized and not erotic," said Gallo, who embarked on a cross-country motorcycle tour to promote the film. "I decided to create a billboard that was like mainstream films'. I would show the images discreetly and break out of the indie mold. Sophisticated people appreciated it." Next, The Village Voice accused Gallo of huffily pulling his three-page essay from the weekly at the last minute after the editor-in-chief refused to run Gallo's full-page photo self-portrait on the cover, hoping to use a steamier image of Gallo and Sevigny from the film. Despite all of the melodrama and Gallo's canny use of the media, the film was still largely derided as immature, trite, monotonous, amateurishly constructed, and utilizing the whiff of scandal to cast Gallo as a misunderstood, iconoclastic oultaw filmmaker when in fact he had merely made a marginal film.