Giulio Grilli Cicilioni

Biography

Giulio Grilli Cicilioni is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, and visual anthropologist. Informed by a theoretical training in anthropology and the study of religions at SOAS, and a practice-based method in visual anthropology from Goldsmiths, his work moves multimodally through installation, performance, visual, writing, and participatory formats. Through the deconstruction of materials, documents, and infrastructures of territoriality, he seeks to recompose them into speculative myths, geographies, and narratives: reflective sites capable of shifting how places, objects, and relationships are perceived, made, and therefore transformed. His current research explores creative kinship with technological entities, the relationships between ecology and virtuality, and community-oriented pedagogical projects. Grilli Cicilioni is co-founder and curator of ANAMIN, a multidisciplinary platform for research and practice in the UAE. Through ANAMIN he has curated two contemporary art festivals, co-curating an exhibition with the NYU Abu Dhabi MFA programme for the second, and a lab on radical imaginaries for Alserkal’s Art Month 2026. He is a former Research Affiliate with NYU Abu Dhabi’s Research Kitchens labs of Future Heritage and The Anthropocene. His ethnographic film Almost Island (2022) was a finalist at the Florida Film Festival and SeeMor Festival. Recently, he has expanded into experimental lecture formats developed through the ANAMIN curatorial lab, treating the lecture as a staged encounter, from speculative conversations with non-human witnesses to participatory exercises in collective imagination. He is currently a guest lecturer on the anthropology of technology at RIT Dubai, as well as a selected participant at 421's Artistic Development program cohort. He lives and works between Dubai and Italy.