Marinella Senatore

Marinella Senatore – a renowned Italian contemporary artist known for participatory art projects that bring together community, collaboration, and social issues through performance, film, and collective actions.

As a multidisciplinary artist (trained in music, visual arts, and film), Marinella Senatore (born in 1977 in Cava Tirreni, Campania; currently lives and works in Rome) draws on collective and participatory elements from her immediate surroundings in her work. Her artistic practice emphasizes the transformative power of social engagement and human relationships. Her interventions function as generators of energy and light and, through her understanding of language as an electrical current, can be described as site-specific repositories for vocal memories of meaningful, inclusive processes of exchange.

Marinella’s work does not begin with the unveiling of an object before an audience, nor does it end with its presentation. It begins earlier—within gatherings—and continues to resonate in the aftermath of the shared experience. By opening up the artistic process and incorporating the work’s becoming, experience, and memory, she questions both the role of the artist and the passive attribution of the “audience.” Her artworks emerge in dialogue with local groups and are based on collective, participatory processes that center social relationships and shared experiences.

Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including at the São Paulo Biennial and Manifesta 12, as well as at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the MAXXI Museum, the Castello di Rivoli, the Palais de Tokyo, the Schirn Kunsthalle, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the High Line, the Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, Bozar, the Queens Museum, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the Serpentine Gallery, the CCA Tel Aviv, the Museo Madre, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Institute for Contemporary Art Richmond, BAK Utrecht, as well as at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and many other venues.

For her artistic work, she became the first woman to receive the “Artista dell'Anno” award from ANGAMC (the National Association of Modern Art Galleries in Italy), in recognition of her lasting contribution to contemporary art and her innovative fusion of art and social engagement.