Biography: Origins in Form and Material
Italian-American born in Venezuela and established in New York City, Marco Palli is an internationally recognized sculptor and multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the architectural, mechanical, and symbolic dimensions of form drawn from the physical properties of materials.
Engineering as Artistic Foundation
Trained as a civil engineer at the Universidad Nacional Experimental de la Fuerza Armada in the campus located in Maracay, Venezuela, and graduated in 2004 with a comprehensive education that encompassed an interdisciplinary and rigorous curriculum. His academic formation traversed the foundational sciences—physics, statics, dynamics, chemistry—alongside methodological disciplines in research, documentation, and logical reasoning. Palli’s technical acumen was further honed through intensive studies in structural theory, soil mechanics, hydrology, reinforced and prestressed concrete, foundations, seismic engineering, and hydraulic design. His training also embraced urban and infrastructural systems: architecture and city planning, traffic engineering, sanitary and electrical installations, and the design of aqueducts, bridges, airports, ports, railways, and pavements. This capacious breadth of knowledge equipped Palli with a uniquely holistic perspective—bridging engineering precision with a conceptual imagination that would later emerge in his artistic and spatial practices. From water clay to Carrara Marble, from Paper to Corten Steel, Palli's trajectory has been marked by an evolution from functional design to conceptual investigations in sculpture, installation, and new media.
In the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary sculpture, Marco Palli stands as a visionary whose intellectual rigor is matched only by his fervent commitment to artistic education and interdisciplinary inquiry. His formal training reflects a trajectory of persistent expansion—from structural and civil foundations to the nuanced architectures of finance, language, and pedagogy.
Bridging Art and Economics
Palli earned his Master of Business Administration in Management from the Keller Graduate School of Management in New York in 2013. His academic engagement was not perfunctory but rather profound, encompassing Business Economics, Managerial and Advanced Finance, Strategic Planning, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Accounting, and the intricate dynamics of mergers, acquisitions, and international finance. This capacious understanding of business systems became essential to his artistic infrastructure—supporting not only the execution of monumental projects but also the conceptual economy with which they are conceived.
Language, Culture, and Communication
His intellectual immersion in American culture and language—commencing with a full-immersion ESL summer intensive at the University of New Hampshire in 2008 and followed by multi-phase studies at ZONI Language Centers in New York—has lent his practice a linguistic and cultural fluency crucial to his work in diverse educational and artistic contexts. Equally remarkable is Palli’s devotion to teaching, which he approaches with the same sculptural intentionality as his art.
Pedagogy as Sculpture: The Art of Teaching
Between 2020 and the present, he has engaged in pedagogical refinement through the Teaching Artist Project (TAP) and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), focusing on inclusive virtual classrooms, the transformative power of writing, and curriculum design.
Academic Appointments and Teaching Legacy
His teaching experience spans continents and institutions: from private instruction to academic appointments, including a Visiting Critique role at Fordham University's Department of Visual Arts, an artist residency at the Brooks School in Massachusetts, and a Visiting Professorship at the Universidad Católica in Temuco, Chile. Notably, at the New York Academy of Art, he served as Teaching Assistant for courses in Structural and Intensive Anatomy under the mentorship of Randy McIver—a role that affirms his dual mastery of both corporeal form and academic rigor. Palli’s pedagogical and intellectual journey is integral to his oeuvre. As he navigates between sculptural practice, cross-cultural discourse, and educational mentorship, his work becomes a site of convergence—a place where learning, making, and reflecting are inseparable acts. The continuing education of Marco Palli forms a masterclass in sustained artistic inquiry—an odyssey across media, continents, and disciplines that testifies to a profound and unrelenting commitment to the evolution of form, concept, and expression.
A Lifelong Student: Continuing Education and Mentorship
Since 2011, Palli has immersed himself in a remarkable sequence of intensive studies at preeminent institutions such as the Art Students League of New York, the New York Studio School, the New York Academy of Art, and international ateliers like the Corsanini Studio in Carrara, Italy. His formation has been shaped under the mentorship of figures such as Leonid Lerman, Robert Cenedella, Garth Evans, April Gornik, and Evan Penny—each encounter sharpening both craft and philosophical depth.
From rigorous Sculpture Marathons at NYSS to forensic reconstruction workshops with Joe Mullins at NYAA, from stone carving like the old masters in Carrara to the anatomical rigor of Lou Marinaro's master classes, each chapter has deepened his sculptural acuity.
Material Experiments and Technological Frontiers
His studies encompass a diverse range of media: welding, stone, clay, mixed media, drawing, painting, digital fabrication, and electronics for artists. More recently, his intellectual pursuits have engaged the frontier of creative technologies, including artificial intelligence and interaction design, as well as the ethics of sustainability in artistic practice. Whether exploring Arduino microcontrollers or comedy writing under Emmy Award-winning mentorship, Palli pursues each medium not as novelty, but as necessity—a response to the ever-expanding demands of artistic truth.
In every case, the continuity of his learning reads not as embellishment but as structural core. This is not the mere accumulation of workshops and classes, but the deliberate construction of a life devoted to art as both discipline and revelation—each layer, each line of inquiry, fused into the architecture of a practice that is as rigorous as it is transformative.
Leadership and Civic Engagement
In the realm of leadership and civic engagement, Marco Palli’s contributions reveal a dimension of service as integral to his identity as any act of creation. Since 2019, he has served as President and Board Director of the Sculptors Alliance, a venerable not-for-profit institution founded in 1980 to champion the sculptural arts through exhibitions, dialogue, and educational outreach. Under his stewardship, the Alliance—entirely sustained by grants and individual philanthropy—has continued to uphold its mission with renewed relevance, functioning as both sanctuary and springboard for artists committed to material inquiry.
Palli’s engagement with the Alliance began not in title but in labor. Between 2017 and 2019, he contributed in a volunteer capacity, offering his time and skill toward a variety of essential but often unseen tasks in New York and Brooklyn—work that speaks to his ethos of humility and quiet stewardship. His record of service extends beyond institutional leadership into deeply humanistic efforts: in the fall of 2016, he volunteered with the Office of Chief Medical Examiners in New York City, offering his sculptural expertise to forensic reconstruction cases, donating all materials himself. That same year, he provided studio assistance to the sculptor Barry X. Ball, helping render the alabaster work Hermaphrodite—an experience emblematic of Palli’s sensitivity to collaborative making.
Earlier still, Palli served as a student representative at the New York Academy of Art from 2014 to 2016, twice elected by his peers—a reflection of the respect and trust he inspired within the academic community. His contributions to public art took root during this formative period as well, when he collaborated with sculptor Natsuki Takauji on a monument commissioned for Riverside Park, New York. Here again, we see a consistent arc of service, not merely as a social obligation, but as a vital expression of the same dedication that informs his artistic practice: the belief that art, at its best, exists in dialogue—between artist and audience, institution and public, matter and meaning.
Marco Palli’s artistic and academic journey has been repeatedly marked by recognition from esteemed institutions across continents—a reflection of both his technical mastery and the conceptual weight of his inquiries. In 2022, he was selected for the Works in Public (WiP) Program—receiving both a fellowship and grant from the Art Students League of New York. This honor affirmed his commitment to public engagement through sculpture, and marked a continuation of his longstanding investment in art’s civic potential.
His work has also been distinguished internationally. In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious Denis Diderot Artist-in-Residence Grant at Château d’Orquevaux in France—an accolade that celebrates creative visionaries working at the intersection of imagination and intellect. That same year, he was also the recipient of the Larry Einbender Travel Award from the New York Studio School, an institution where his practice found fertile ground and critical support. Previous years saw him garner the Jane Chace Carroll Scholarship for Excellence (2017), as well as multiple recognitions from the Sculptors Alliance—including an Honorable Mention for his metalwork, as adjudicated by curator David C. Terry.
From 2015 to 2016, Palli’s education at the New York Studio School was sustained by a constellation of scholarships, including the Milton and Sally Avery Scholarship, the Goldhammer Family Foundation Scholarship, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation Scholarship, and the institution’s own Merit Scholarship Award. That same period, he was recognized by the SoHo Art Society as Mentor of the Year—an acknowledgment of his ability to guide, inspire, and elevate others in the studio classroom and beyond.
Earlier, at the New York Academy of Art, Palli received the Coach Merit Award and a Carrara Residency Merit Award (2015), and was named an Academy Merit Scholar (2014). His capacity for sustained intensity in studio practice earned him a Summer Marathon Scholarship from the New York Studio School that same year. From the Art Students League of New York, he received two consecutive Dot Awards “Blue” (2012, 2013), further cementing his reputation for excellence among his peers and mentors.
Honors and Recognitions
Long before arriving in New York, Palli had already demonstrated a profound academic rigor. In 2002, he received the Frame of Honor for achieving the highest academic distinction at the Universidad Nacional Experimental de las Fuerzas Armadas in Caracas, Venezuela. From 1999 to 2004, he was the beneficiary of the Fundayacucho 5-Year Grant from La Fundación Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho—a national scholarship bestowed upon Venezuela’s most promising minds.
These honors, diverse in scope and geography, trace a portrait of an artist whose excellence is neither episodic nor isolated, but rooted in a sustained commitment to inquiry, education, and the eloquence of form.
Exhibitions: Solo and Collaborative Explorations
Marco Palli’s exhibition history reveals a practice defined by persistent experimentation, a poetic confrontation with material, and a commitment to public discourse through sculpture. His solo exhibitions, both national and international, have served as staging grounds for deeply personal and philosophical inquiries into form, language, and perception.
In 2020, Palli was honored with the Larry Einbender Travel Award Solo Exhibition at the New York Studio School, presenting The Origin of Sculpture—a conceptual investigation into the primal impulses of sculptural creation. This followed The New Herd of Thoughts (2019), also at NYSS, which challenged cognitive boundaries through sculptural abstraction. Earlier solo exhibitions include Cuts, Cutouts and Offcuts (2018) at the Robert Lehman Art Center in Massachusetts and its site-responsive iteration, Cutouts and Offcuts Sculpture Garden, installed along the Appalachian Trail in Kent, Connecticut.
From the raw materiality of Inner Strength / Superficial Decay at Chester French Studio to the contemplative syntax of The Universe’s Language and Acoustic Space (both 2017), Palli has consistently transformed galleries into immersive environments. His practice also extends beyond conventional spaces: early exhibitions such as Listen with Your Eyes traveled in private viewings across Caracas, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, and New York between 2010–2012, demonstrating a commitment to intimacy and cultural exchange beyond institutional frameworks.
Palli’s contributions to group exhibitions are equally prolific and nuanced. In 2023, he participated in Works in Public (WiP) at the Art Students League of New York, where his work was showcased among select artists dedicated to the intersection of sculpture and public space. That same year, he exhibited at the historic Phillis Harriman Mason Gallery.
His presence at the New York Studio School has been both formative and celebrated, with repeated inclusion in highly curated exhibitions such as the 2019 Alumni Invitational—juried by figures including Robert Franca, David Humphrey, Judith Linhares, Fran O’Neill, and Claire Sherman—as well as multiple Open Studios, Thesis Exhibitions, and thematic group shows dating back to 2016. His collaborative exhibition Objecthood (2018), curated by Jilaine Jones at Dumbo Sculpture Studio, typified his interest in sculpture’s ontological questions.
Notably, Palli’s work has been a recurring feature in interdisciplinary spaces, such as Seeing the Voices (2018), which combined his visual art with musical compositions by Kobi Arad and Oran Etkin. His commitment to collaborative and community-based art is reflected in contributions to Figment on Governors Island, A Sculpture Exhibit: Metal curated by Natsuki Takauji for the Sculptors Alliance, and Nation VI: The Greatest Show on Earth at Sideshow Gallery.
Earlier milestones include participation in Trasparente per Transcendenza at Corsanini Studio in Carrara, Italy (2015), and COPY/CUT/EDIT, a curatorial collaboration with Daniela Izaguirre at NYAA (2014). His roots in the New York art scene were established at the Art Students League, with early exhibitions at the Phillis Harriman Mason Gallery in 2012 and 2013. Even as early as 2011, Palli was contributing to community-focused events such as the Bushwick Arts Festival, with Littera Urban in Red, curated by Yvanova Silva and Frances Velasquez.
Each exhibition, whether presented in traditional gallery spaces or site-specific installations, reveals Palli’s unwavering belief in sculpture’s potential to interrogate and illuminate the human condition.
Curatorial Voice: Juror and Thought Leader
In addition to his artistic and educational endeavors, Marco Palli has served as a juror for distinguished exhibitions, offering his critical insight and sculptural expertise to the evaluation of contemporary art. In 2025, he was honored to join the international jury panel for The London Sculpture Prize, serving alongside preeminent figures such as the Chilean master sculptor Francisco Gazitua; the esteemed Indonesian artist and activist Dolorosa Sinaga; Sam Cornish, a curator and scholar with notable affiliations to the Saatchi Gallery and the John Hoyland Estate; Lucie MacGregor, a sculptor and pedagogue active in Berlin and London; Ali Jabbar, a global figure in contemporary sculpture; and Robert Jones, a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors known for his environmentally charged practice. Earlier, in 2019, Palli served as a juror for “The Illusion and Reality” at Ning Gallery in New York, alongside Xiaojuan Xie and Ruonan Yan, where his discerning perspective helped shape the curatorial direction of the exhibition. These appointments affirm his role not only as an artist of practice but as an active interlocutor in the evolving discourse of sculpture.
Philosophy: Sculpture as Dialogue
Marco believes in the transformative power of art to shape collective consciousness. He invites the viewer to engage with his pieces not only through observation but through interaction and narrative, bridging the physical and digital realms.