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 conscious choice to traverse languages – from visual arts to cinema, philosophy, theatre, writing, and curatorship – is not a mere accumulation of skills, but a critical and political gesture: a form of resistance to cultural and disciplinary homogenization, a way of inhabiting the threshold as an existential and artistic stance.
For Illuminato, language is not an abstract code but a living body – word, sound, gesture, image, relation – weaving together literary, philosophical, artistic, and audiovisual training into a pursuit of embodied meaning. Each expressive medium becomes a threshold, a space where the visible and the invisible converge and transform, opening paths to authentic presence and relation.
His work dwells in the “in-between”: between disciplines, forms of knowledge, institutions and margins, word and flesh. Not just an artist and author, but also a curator, journalist, filmmaker, and theorist, Illuminato embraces this liminal condition as a founding principle of his research, nourished by intersections and contaminations.
His civic engagement is inseparable from his aesthetics. Vulnerability, a central theme in his research-work, is not seen as weakness but as an aesthetic of truth and an ethics of encounter. From the VulnerarTe magazine and movement to his film and television works dedicated to memory, justice, and the environment, his practice reflects a politics of responsibility and openness to the other.
The body, in its fragile concreteness and political-perceptual force, stands at the radiant core of his inquiry. It is not merely a subject but an ontological condition: the threshold not as a place but as a posture toward the world, as a relational experience that opens space for meaning in the present.
He holds a Master’s degree in Literature and Philosophy from La Sapienza University of Rome, as well as additional degrees in Painting and Sculpture and in Cinema and Performing Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. He also completed a certified Master in Contemporary Art at MoMA in New York. A registered member of the Lazio Journalists’ Association, he directed the Information and Communication Centre for the United Nations Environment Programme in the Mediterranean (UNEP/MAP), developing cultural communication projects focused on language, perception, and ecological awareness.
As a curator, he has conceived and produced exhibitions in prominent venues in Italy and abroad, including the former Papal Prison in Velletri, the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, the Historical Museum of Villa Altieri in Rome, Palazzo Valentini, Villa Madama, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Fondazione Memmo, and numerous foreign embassies and academies in Italy. His major projects include Iosonovulnerabile, Around Seduction – dedicated to Susanna de Lempicka – and the cycle Around Futurism. He also curated the related catalogues.
As a writer, he has published essays and books, including Iosonovulnerabile and Corpus et Vulnus. Tàpies, Kiefer, and Parmiggiani, and regularly contributes to contemporary art journals such as Artribune, Dialectika, E-zine, and VulnerarTe.
As an artist, he has exhibited in solo and group shows in 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 cinema, he has written, directed, and produced the short film Vulnerare (world premiere at the New York Independent Film Festival, European premiere at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris), the art film Corpus et Vulnus, the documentary Mediterranea, and the official spot for the 30th anniversary of the Barcelona Convention, commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Italian Government. He also directed Around Futurism, a documentary for Fondazione Memmo and the Italian Association for Cancer Research (AIRC).
In television, he has conceived, written, and produced numerous RAI programs, including Il Festival delle Azalee, AmoRoma (a live broadcast from Piazza di Spagna), Omaggio a Toscanini from Teatro Argentina, and Giù la Maschera. In scena contro la Mafia, staged at Palermo’s La Favorita Stadium shortly after the 1992 mafia massacres, in collaboration with Italy’s major trade unions CGIL, CISL, and UIL.
His theatrical roots lie in his work as assistant director alongside Maurizio Scaparro at the Teatro Stabile di Roma, in productions such as Memoirs of Hadrian with Giorgio Albertazzi and Pulcinella with Massimo Ranieri.
Through his work, Sergio Mario Illuminato offers a radical and sensitive vision of the present: to inhabit vulnerability as an existential condition, to reflect on the body and memory, and to open spaces of poetic resistance and relational depth in a world increasingly disembodied and fragmented.