Bio
Elisa Selli is a visual artist based in Rome. In her work plants are never just plants: through painting, installation and textile, gardens, greenhouses and journeys become spaces of contemplation, between figuration and abstraction.
Her painting and installation projects take shape from a direct and necessary relationship with places. She travels, observes, then dissects: La Mortella, the garden Lady Walton created on Ischia, became Myrtus (Naples, 2025), paintings flanked by a site-specific carpet-tapestry; a journey through Mexico became Maguey (Rome, 2026), with paintings, stamps, postcards and video. Each project adds a point to a growing map of places turned into works.
She graduated in Painting from RUFA – Rome University of Fine Arts (2018) and holds an MA in Visual Arts and Fashion from Università Iuav di Venezia (2021), working under the supervision of Antoni Muntadas and Angela Vettese. Her thesis on memory devices — images, cultures, technologies — looked at experimental documentary cinema. In Lisbon, where she spent an Erasmus research period at the Faculdade de Belas-Artes, she also learned weaving, a technique that now runs through her installations.
Her work has been shown at Festival Francescano in Bologna, 8Salon in Hamburg, the V-A-C Foundation in Venice, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome, Forte de Santo António da Barra in Estoril and Palazzo Ducale Orsini Colonna in Tagliacozzo, where in 2022 her installation Bouquet rose from a floor of around 280 dried bouquets. In 2017 she received the Sky Arte HD Award at the RUFA Contest.
Alongside the studio, Selli builds spaces for exchange. She co-founded the artist-run spaces Spazio In Situ (2016–18) and LEA (2022–, with artist Ellen Wolf), and L'Artificio, a painting and drawing programme for people with Down syndrome, presented at MUST – Museum of Earth Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome. In 2022 she founded and directed Ladispolaneamente, a contemporary art festival in Ladispoli. She worked as production assistant for the Icelandic Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale; today she teaches painting and drawing in Rome and works with young people on visual and media literacy (Erasmus+ SENTINEL, 2026).
