Born in Naples in 1984, Alessia Zolfo is a visual artist, writer, and educator. Her practice
explores the fragility of human experience through processes of transformation. Driven by a
curious gaze, poetic sensitivity, and an experimental impulse, she investigates the tension
between the limits of identity and the possibilities of a free and authentic expression.
After studying Philosophy, she earned a degree in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in
Frosinone.
With seventeen years of experience teaching Drawing and Art History at the secondary school
level, she integrates artistic research with pedagogical exploration.
Thanks to her CLIL training and specialization in teaching methodologies–developed also
through numerous Erasmus+ projects –she promotes an open, sensitive, and transdisciplinary
educational approach, grounded in care, relationship, and a conscious way of inhabiting the
world.
Her work moves through photography, graphic, poetry, painting, and sculpture, with a particular
focus on organic and often degradable materials: clay, wooden containers, textiles, reclaimed
papers, plant elements, remnants of consumption, and traces of the human.
Through these materials, she explores the threshold between visibility and disappearance,
constructing narratives that intertwine personal memory and collective stories.
She defines her devices as hybrid entities, crossed by a cyclical vision of time.
Her art restores fragility as a living presence and poetic resistance, in surfaces marked by
layers, abrasions, and transparencies.
In her paintings dwell figures without identity, universal mythologies, and anatomies of thought.
Journals and suspended maps are composed of shared marks and signs – inviting the viewer to
move through and inhabit the space with their gaze.
Through the Scatolari di scorta — polysemic pittosculptures, laced with irony and critique – she
gathers epiphanies of the past and urgencies of the present.
Her practice honors impermanence through gestures of care, ephemeral actions, and
emotionally resonant videopoems.
This research has taken shape in various exhibition contexts dedicated to identity, nature, and
landscape, including: Animalia III Biennale d’Irpinia at Mu.Ca.M. in Montella (Avellino, IT), Utopia
del Sembiante at the Landscape Museum in Torre di Mosto (Venice, IT), La Terra ha bisogno
degli Uomini at the Royal Palace of Caserta, and Past Whispers –site-specific installation
created for the Sermoneta Art Festival 2024 (Latina, IT).
Over the course of a twenty-year career, she has exhibited in Italy and abroad, including the
54th Venice Biennale, the Rome Triennale (2014 and 2023), the Florence International Biennale
2023, and Oasis International (La Pelanda, Rome).
She has received numerous awards and recognitions, including merit mentions at the Mestre
Painting Prize, the Luxembourg Art Prize, and the ARTE Mondadori – CAIRO Prize.
In 2025, she published the poetry collection Sguardi Sparsi (Montag Edizioni, Solaris series – La
grande poesia) and was awarded second prize at the 10th edition of the Salvatore Quasimodo
International Literary Prize, promoted by Aletti Publishing House, for an unpublished poetry
collection.
Lives and works in Alatri (FR), Italy.
