Igor Savchenko was born in 1962 in Minsk, Belarus, in the Soviet Union. He studied cybernetics and automatic control systems at the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics, and graduated in 1985 with a degree in electrical engineering. Until the early 1990s, he worked as an engineer in Minsk. Savchenko is also an avid scuba diver, having begun his training in 1980 with instructor Valery Burtsev in Minsk. In 2005, he participated in a deep-diving master class at the famous Blue Hole in South Sinai, Egypt.
In the late 1980s, Savchenko began working as a photographer through his involvement with Valery Lobko’s Creative Photography Studio. In 1990, he was awarded a prize by the Kodak-Pathe Foundation at the Salon Internationale de la Recherche Photographique in Royan, France. He received his first solo exhibition the following year at Galleri Index/Fotograficentrum (now the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation) in Stockholm, Sweden. From 1997 through 2005, he pursued various text-based and mixed media projects, and in 2006 he returned his focus to photography. In 2013, he received his first solo exhibition in Moscow at the Lumière Brothers Centre for Photography.
Igor Savchenko lives and works in Minsk, Belarus. He is represented by Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York; by Giedre Bartelt Galerie in Berlin; and by Russiantearoom (RTR) Gallery in Paris.