Ugo Puglisi

Ugo Puglisi was born in Catania in 1978 and grew up in Trieste. After earning a degree in Political Science, he began working in cinema as a producer with Minotaurus Pictures in 2004 and as a filmmaker, directing short films of various genres and music videos. Among his most appreciated works are Binario Morto, Lo Scorbutico che Dorme, The Dark Side, Io Sono Jeffrey, Il Fiocco di Aquileia, Ego Te Absolvo, and Ka Mun Lee - The Huntress.

During his filmmaking career, he won several awards both in Italy and abroad and collaborated with other directors on numerous film projects as assistant director, special effects artist, costume designer, and set designer. Among the most important are Il Buio e la Luce by Emanuele Flangini, La Cura del Male by Mattia Bello, La Croce di Ferro and Io Non le Credo by Luca Bertossi, The Master by Elisabetta Cancelli, La Città delle Spie by Ionel Ricatti, and La Quinta Pagina by Giovanni Rizzuto.

In 2025, he spent some time living in Rome, where he had the opportunity to meet master special effects artist Sergio Stivaletti and special effects expert Paolo Galiano, with whom he collaborated on the set of director Sergio Castellitto’s latest film, Regina.

In the field of model making, he has designed and built prototypes of spaceships, futuristic vehicles, and robots, specializing in scratch-built buildings and architectural structures in scales 1:48, 1:35, 1:24, and 1:10. Over the years, he has won prestigious awards in Italy and abroad, and some of his models have been featured in renowned industry magazines such as Model Time. The magazine published a detailed article dedicated to Franky, a fully hand-sculpted and hand-painted 1:5 scale bust depicting Frankenstein in a cyberpunk style, an extensive tutorial on building structures from recycled materials, and a report on the scratch-building of MerkAbra, a futuristic armored biped in 1:72 scale.

The magazine Paolo Parente's DUST Modelling, distributed worldwide including in Japan, featured an article dedicated to Ski Citroen, a 1:48 scale scratch-built model that won the gold medal at the Lucca Model Contest, one of Europe’s most important science fiction modeling competitions. He has also conducted several workshops dedicated to miniature scenery scratch-building during major events such as Fantacon in Turin and PLAY in Modena.

Since 2015, in Trieste, he has also organized the international competition showcase I Corti dei Fabbri, dedicated to independent cinema and emerging young directors. In 2020, he published his first book, Vita da Film, a collection of short stories, some of which became subjects for films and screenplays.