Cettina Donato (born Concetta Donato, October 12, 1976, in Messina, Sicily) is an Italian jazz pianist, composer, arranger and conductor. She grew up in Messina, where she first came to music on drums at age six before switching to piano at seven. She trained classically through a diploma at the Francesco Cilea Conservatory in Reggio Calabria, then turned to jazz under pianist Salvatore Bonafede, graduating from the Antonio Corelli Conservatory in Messina in 2006 with a thesis on Bill Evans's 1979 Paris concert. Alongside her music studies she also earned a degree in social psychology from the University of Messina, followed by two master's degrees in music pedagogy and a doctorate in music didactics. In 2011 she graduated from Berklee College of Music in Boston with a degree in jazz composition, where she won the Carla Bley Award as the department's best composer.

Donato's leader discography began with Pristine (2008), recorded with her own quintet. After settling in Boston, she formed the Cettina Donato Orchestra in 2011 - a big band expanded with a string quartet - and recorded the orchestra's debut, Crescendo, in 2012. She has since conducted her own compositions and arrangements with a range of ensembles on both sides of the Atlantic: the Late Night Jazz Orchestra in Los Angeles, the Orchestra del Teatro Vittorio Emanuele in Messina, the Orchestra Sinfonica della Città Metropolitana di Bari, the Lucca Jazz Donna Orchestra, and the New Talents Jazz Orchestra in Rome. Her own biography and several Italian jazz outlets describe her as the only woman in Italy who both conducts classical symphony orchestras in jazz repertoire and writes the arrangements those orchestras perform; this campaign's research found no source disputing the claim, but also no independent registry capable of confirming a superlative of that kind, so it is presented here as a widely repeated description rather than an independently audited fact.

Alongside the large-ensemble work, Donato has kept a parallel small-group career as a leader: the trio album Third (2015, Blue Art Records); Persistency: The New York Project (2017, Alfa Music), a quartet session cut with American drummer Eliot Zigmund, best known for his years in Bill Evans's trio; Piano 4 Hands (2019, Alfa Music), a two-piano duo record with fellow Italian pianist Stefania Tallini, joined by clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi and actor Ninni Bruschetta as narrator; and To Love Or Not To Love (2025, Alfa Music), a trio-plus-guests session featuring trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso and vocalist Michela Lombardi. In 2021 she released I Siciliani (also credited as Vero Succo di Poesia), a spoken-word-and-jazz tribute to the Sicilian poet Antonio Caldarella (1959-2008), pairing actor Ninni Bruschetta's readings of his verse with BIM Orchestra strings and a jazz quartet of saxophonist Dario Cecchini, bassist Dario Rosciglione and drummer Mimmo Campanale, with Donato herself on piano and percussion.

She has been awarded the JazzIt prize for Best Arranger in Italy on four occasions per her own official biography (2013, 2016, 2018 and 2019); the 2016 award is independently corroborated by a secondary source, and her albums Crescendo and Third were separately singled out by JazzIt among the year's best Italian jazz records. In 2019 the University of Messina named her among its "Alumni Eccellenti." She continues to teach jazz piano at the "N. Piccinni" Conservatory in Bari and jazz composition at the "A. Corelli" Conservatory in Messina, after earlier teaching posts at the Vivaldi Conservatory in Alessandria and the Mascagni Conservatory in Livorno, and has worked as a tutor in harmony, ear training, composition, arranging and conducting at Berklee. Her performing credits include Umbria Jazz, SXSW in Austin, Messina Sea Jazz, the Women in Jazz Festival in Rome, Lucca Jazz Donna, and a Cettina Donato Quartet date at the Blue Note in New York.

Donato's music sits at the meeting point of jazz composition, orchestral writing and Sicilian folk feeling. All About Jazz's Vittorio Lo Conte has praised her as a bandleader whose piano playing lifts the whole ensemble; JazzIt Magazine has singled out her use of odd meters (7/4 time on pieces including "Goodfaith" and "Last Minute"), vamps and riffs as a compositional signature; and L'isola che non c'era's Andrea Romano has compared the melodic and harmonic reach of her writing to Gershwin and Ellington. SentireAscoltare's Stefano Solventi has described her music as carrying a distinctly Mediterranean, "passionate" quality. That range shows across her catalog: the Cool Jazz-tagged small-group records (Pristine, Third, Persistency) sit next to the Big Band writing of Crescendo and the string-and-quartet hybrid of I Siciliani, all built on the same jazz-composition foundation she developed at Berklee and in her Bill Evans-focused conservatory thesis.