Mariano Baino is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist, hailed by Montreal's FantAsia Film Festival (where his film “DARK WATERS” received the coveted Prix Du Public) as “one of the great torchbearers for expressionistic genre cinema”. He won the “Vincent Price Award for outstanding contribution to fantastic cinema” and the "Silver Bat Career Achievement Award" at Rome’s FantaFestival.

His feature film DARK WATERS, “a veritable object of veneration among horror fans” in the words of Italian newspaper La Repubblica, received prestigious gala screenings at Lincoln Center in New York, the National Cinema Museum in Turin, Italy, the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theater and the Italian Cinematheque in Rome, and has been released to great acclaim all over the