S A R A G R I L L I - Bio
She graduated with honors in New Art Technologies, specializing in Multimedia Arts, from the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice in 2018. From 2016 to 2017, she worked on the docufilm "La Stanza delle Pietre e del Cielo," which addresses the phenomenon of the Psychiatric Judicial Hospitals established in Italy in the 1970s following the abolition of mental asylums. The project, sponsored by the Campania Region, the Naples Human Rights Film Festival, and the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies, is based on a memoir written in the first person by a former inmate in 1974, denouncing the abuses, violence, and deaths that occurred within the walls of the criminal asylum in Aversa.
Since 2020, she has been pursuing a second-level academic diploma in Sculpture under the guidance of professors Aron Demetz and Mario Airò. From 2021 to 2022, she was included in the first project of the International Center for Research on Contemporary Arts of the Venice Biennale, titled "The Geopolitical Map of Artists Who Participated in the Biennales in the Last 20 Years, from 1999 to 2020," distinguishing herself by mapping the expressive codes present during the 51st Biennale of Visual Arts.
In February 2022, she founded MiRNArte, an organization focused on enhancing the artistic and cultural heritage of territories through research and the development of experimental artistic languages. In November 2022, she won the 26th International “Sculpture to Live" competition promoted by the Peano Foundation of Cuneo with the permanent installation "I Have a Dream" scheduled for 2025.
She graduated with honors on February 28, 2023, with a thesis titled "Viral Human. Public Art and Metaverse." The project, accessible via a mobile app (iOS and Android), was inaugurated on June 25, 2023, and consists of a sound installation virtually spread across the Island of Venice and an international site-specific collective exhibition. The initiative was sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, the Ugo and Olga Levi Foundation, the Venice Conservatory of Music, the Venice Civic Museums Foundation, and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco.
Among the members of the judging panel were Fabrizio Plessi, Riccardo Caldura, Carlo Boccadoro, and Roberto Gottipavero. She was selected for the Biennale Conference organized by ELIA (European League of Institutes of the Arts) and hosted by NABA (New Academy of Fine Arts) from November 20-23. The conference theme, "Arts Plural" celebrates artistic intelligence as a contribution to solving global issues through a pluralistic and intergenerational commitment to artistic interpretation and practice. She was selected to exhibit at the CICA Museum in Gimpo-si for the 2024 edition of "Voices."
She conceived a spin-off of “Viral Human” in the form of a phygital board game titled "PLAGUE IN VENICE," aimed at promoting scientific dissemination, cultural and social change, and artistic exploration. The project was validated by the CNR and is being developed with the Game Science Research Center, an inter-university research center administratively based at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca.
She was among the artists awarded the 'Culture Moves Europe' mobility grant promoted by the European Union in 2024. The research project titled 'Harlem Heroines and the Black Resistance: When African American Art Sealed the Alliance with Paris' will be developed in Paris in collaboration with Monique Y. Wells of Entrée to Black Paris and other institutions as AWARE Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions. The aim of the research is to create an intercontinental site-specific artistic intervention in AR (Augmented Reality), spread between Paris and Harlem, with the goal of bridging the temporal gap with the new generations of the African diaspora regarding the significance of this heritage, particularly in terms of social justice and human rights.
