Sergio Mario Illuminato is a transdisciplinary artist born in Catania and currently based in Rome, with significant formative and professional experiences in London and New York. His practice consciously traverses multiple languages — from visual arts to cinema, from philosophy to theatre, from writing to curatorial work — not as a mere accumulation of skills, but as a critical and political gesture: a form of resistance to cultural and disciplinary standardization, a way of inhabiting the threshold as both an existential and research condition.
For Illuminato, language is not an abstract code but a living body — word, sound, gesture, image, relation — that intertwines literary, philosophical, artistic, and audiovisual training in a profound inquiry into embodiment. Every expressive medium thus becomes a threshold, a space of transition where the visible and the invisible meet and transform, generating possibilities of relation and authentic presence.
His practice unfolds in the “in-between”: between disciplines, between forms of knowledge, between institutions and margins, between word and flesh. Not only an artist and author, but also a curator, journalist, filmmaker, and theorist, Illuminato lives and promotes this liminal condition as the founding principle of his research, nourished by crossings and contaminations. His civic engagement is deeply intertwined with his aesthetic vision. Vulnerability — the central theme of his work — is not perceived as weakness, but as an aesthetics of truth and an ethics of encounter. From the magazine and movement VulnerarTe to his cinematic and television productions devoted to memory, justice, and the environment, his work reflects a politics of responsibility and openness toward the other.
The body, in its fragile concreteness and its perceptive and political power, is the radiant core of his research. It is not merely a theme but an ontological condition: the threshold not as a place, but as an attitude toward the world — an experience of relation that opens spaces of meaning within the present.
Illuminato holds a Master’s Degree in Literature and Philosophy from Sapienza University of Rome, as well as Master’s Degrees in Painting and Sculpture, and in Cinema and Performing Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.
He completed his education with a certified Master in Contemporary Art at the MoMA in New York and a Master in Screenwriting at Anica Academy.
A member of the Order of Journalists of Lazio since 1993, he directed the Information and Communication Center for the United Nations Environment Programme in the Mediterranean (UNEP/MAP), curating international cultural and film projects focused on the intersection between language, perception, and ecological awareness.
As a curator, he has conceived and produced transdisciplinary events in prestigious venues in Italy and abroad. In Rome, his projects have taken place at Villa Madama, the MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, the Memmo Foundation Museum, the Historical Museum of Villa Altieri, and Palazzo Gabrielli-Mignanelli, future home of the PM23 structure of the Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti Foundation. In Paris, he worked with the Italian Cultural Institute; in Velletri, at the former Pontifical Prison; and in numerous embassies and foreign academies throughout Italy. Among his main curatorial projects are iosonovulnerabile, Intorno alla Seduzione (dedicated to Susanna de Lempicka), and the series Intorno al Futurismo, for which he also curated the catalogues.
As an author, he has published essays and books including La Soglia di Basalto – From the Roots of the Immersive Image to Post-Organic Cinema: Toward a Manifesto Film Between Vision, Body and Artificial Intelligence, iosonovulnerabile (Parts I and II), and Corpus et Vulnus. Tàpies, Kiefer and Parmiggiani. He has contributed to leading contemporary art journals such as Artribune, Dialectika, E-Zine, and VulnerarTe.
As an artist, he has exhibited in solo and group shows across Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Latvia, and the United Arab Emirates, with the support of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the diplomatic network.
In film, he has written, directed, and produced the short film Vulnerare (European premiere at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris; Best Direction / Experimental Film at New York and Los Angeles festivals), the art film Corpus et Vulnus, the documentary Mediterranea, and the official short The 30th Anniversary of the Barcelona Convention, produced for the United Nations Environment Programme and the Italian Government. He also directed the documentary Intorno al Futurismo for the Memmo Foundation and the Italian Association for Cancer Research.
For television, he has created, written, and produced numerous programs for RAI, including Il Festival delle Azalee, Amoroma (live from Piazza di Spagna), Omaggio a Toscanini from Teatro Argentina, and Giù la Maschera. In Scena contro la Mafia, staged at La Favorita Stadium in Palermo after the 1992 bombings, in collaboration with CGIL, CISL, and UIL.
His theatrical roots trace back to his work alongside Maurizio Scaparro at the Teatro Stabile di Roma, where he served as assistant director on productions such as Memorie di Adriano with Giorgio Albertazzi and Pulcinella with Massimo Ranieri.
Through his work, Sergio Mario Illuminato proposes a radical and sensitive vision of the present: to inhabit vulnerability as an existential condition, to reflect on body and memory, and to open spaces of authentic relation and poetic resistance in an increasingly disembodied and fragmented world.