Sergio Mario Illuminato is a transdisciplinary artist born in Catania and currently based in Rome, with significant educational and professional experience in London and New York. His conscious choice to move across languages – from visual arts to cinema, from philosophy to theatre, from writing to curating – is not a mere accumulation of skills but a critical and political gesture: a form of resistance against cultural and disciplinary conformity, an inhabiting of thresholds as a mode of existence and inquiry.

For Illuminato, language is not an abstract code but a living body – word, sound, gesture, image, relationship – that weaves together literary, philosophical, artistic, and audiovisual training in a pursuit of embodiment. Each expressive medium thus becomes a threshold, a space where the visible and invisible meet and transform, creating possibilities for genuine connection and presence.

His practice dwells 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, director, and theorist, Illuminato embraces and promotes this liminal condition as a founding principle of his research, which thrives on crossings and contaminations.

His civic engagement is deeply interwoven with his aesthetics. Vulnerability, a central theme in his research and work, is not viewed as weakness but as an aesthetics of truth and an ethics of encounter. From the magazine and movement VulnerarTe to his film and television productions focused on memory, justice, and the environment, his work reflects a politics of responsibility and openness to the other.

The body – in its fragile concreteness and political-perceptive 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 a stance toward the world, as a relational experience that opens spaces of meaning in the present time.

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 further completed a certified Master’s in Contemporary Art at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. A registered journalist with the Order of Journalists of Lazio, he served as Director of the Information and Communication Center for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP/MAP) in the Mediterranean, coordinating cultural communication projects focused on the intersection of language, perception, and ecological awareness.

As a curator, he has conceived and produced exhibitions at prestigious 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 embassies and foreign academies in Italy. His major curatorial projects include Iosonovulnerabile, Around Seduction – dedicated to Susanna de Lempicka – and the cycle Around Futurism. He has also edited their respective catalogues.

As an author, he has published essays and books, including Iosonovulnerabile and Corpus et Vulnus: Tàpies, Kiefer, and Parmiggiani, and 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 Italian diplomatic network.

In film, he has worked as author, director, and producer on 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 celebrating 30 years of the Barcelona Convention, produced for the United Nations Environment Programme and the Italian Government. He also directed the documentary Around Futurism for Fondazione Memmo and the Italian Association for Cancer Research.

In television, he has created, written, and produced numerous programs for RAI, including Il Festival delle Azalee, AmoRoma (broadcast live from Piazza di Spagna), Tribute to Toscanini from Teatro Argentina, and Giù la Maschera: On Stage Against the Mafia, performed at La Favorita Stadium in Palermo in the aftermath of the 1992 massacres, in collaboration with Italy’s major trade unions CGIL, CISL, and UIL.

His theatrical roots lie in his work alongside Maurizio Scaparro at the Teatro Stabile di Roma, where he served as assistant director 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: inhabiting vulnerability as an existential condition, reflecting on the body and memory, opening spaces for authentic relationships and poetic resistance in a world increasingly disembodied and fragmented.