Fabrizio Puglisi was born in Catania, Sicily, on 16 June 1969 and moved to Bologna in 1987 to study at the DAMS, the university's department of art, music and performing arts. He graduated with honors in 1995 with a thesis on Cecil Taylor. His biographies also place him in the jazz improvisation seminars at Siena between 1986 and 1991, with Franco D'Andrea, Enrico Rava and Bruno Tommaso as teachers, though that is a biographical claim rather than something a release credit can show.

Bologna's improvising scene shaped his early records. He is a co-founder of the Collettivo Bassesfere, the musicians' association and label whose catalogue carries his 1998 trio record Atman, the 2010 live trio album Laiv and the 2012 collective record Senza Alibi. That first trio brought him together with reedman Achille Succi and guitarist Alberto Capelli; a quartet version with drummer Mirko Sabatini followed on Puntolinea (Bassesfere, 2004). Around the same years he played piano in Domenico Caliri's Specchio Ensemble on Suite No. 1 Per Quintetto Doppio (1995) and Porcyville (2003), and in the large ensemble of Alfredo Impullitti's Kaos Ensemble on La Geometria Dell'Abisso (Splasc(h), 1997), a record that also features trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and Succi on bass clarinet.

He then spent several years in Amsterdam around the turn of the millennium, where his Discogs biography lists work with cellist Ernst Reijseger, drummer Han Bennink and others in the Dutch improvised-music community. Two documented results of that period are Duets For Prepared Unprepared And Toy Pianos (Evil Rabbit, 2006), recorded at the Bimhuis in February 2004 with the composer-pianist Albert van Veenendaal, and Laiv (Bassesfere, 2010), a trio with Bennink and bassist Ernst Glerum recorded live in Rome on 27 November 2006, mixing three free improvisations with "Epistrophy", Ellington's "African Flower" and other jazz repertoire. His Discogs biography also names three pieces he wrote for the Dutch big band Tetzepi, released on that ensemble's albums Crush and Seed.

Back in Italy, the next fixed point is Rope, a piano trio with double bassist Stefano Senni and drummer Zeno De Rossi. It has two El Gallo Rojo records, Have You Met Miss Bates? (2005) and Saints And Sinners (2009, mixed by Enrico Terragnoli), and returned in 2021 with In the Moment - The Music of Charlie Haden on Hora Records, with Petra Haden singing "Shenandoah". In parallel he became a regular sideman across Italian creative music: with vocalist Cristina Zavalloni, trombonist Gianluca Petrella and bassist Antonio Borghini on the Open Quartet's live When You Go Yes Is Yes! (Felmay, recorded in Utrecht in April 2003); with drummer Cristiano Calcagnile on a trio with saxophonist Alessandro Bosetti, on Gaia Mattiuzzi's Laut (2013) and on Six Dances Under with Borghini; and as the pianist on Enrico Terragnoli's L'Anniversaire, alongside Succi, Danilo Gallo and Francesco Bearzatti.

He is also a credited pianist of the Italian Instabile Orchestra, on Totally Gone (Rai Trade, 2010, recorded in December 2009) and on Plays Ellington (Felmay, 2025, recorded live in Porto in December 2013 and arranged and conducted by Giancarlo Schiaffini). Around him in those two lineups are Gianluigi Trovesi, Carlo Actis Dato, Paolo Damiani, Eugenio Colombo, Daniele Cavallanti, Alberto Mandarini, Pino Minafra and violinist Emanuele Parrini. Cavallanti also brought him into his Brotherhood Creative Trance Music Ensemble for Faces And Tales (Rudi Records, 2013, recorded at the Milano AH-UM festival in May 2012).

The projects under his own name are the most distinctive. Giallo Oro (Caligola, 2017), by his septet Fabrizio Puglisi Guantanamo, was recorded at Artesuono in Cavalicco on 18 and 19 July 2014 with vibraphonist Pasquale Mirra, bassist Davide Lanzarini, drummer Gaetano Alfonsi, percussionists Danilo Mineo and William Simone and, as a guest, singer Venus Rodriguez. It reworks the Afro-Cuban tradition that ran through 1940s and 1950s jazz, and its closing track is a tribute to the Senegalese drummer Doudou Ndiaye Rose. In the same year he released Sento Doppio with the vocalist John De Leo (Carosello, 2017), a duo record of voice-and-piano experiments and reworkings of "Naima" and Monk's "Crepuscule With Nellie", with Petrella as guest on two tracks. Since 2013 he has also worked as a duo with the German drummer Günter "Baby" Sommer; their record Elements (Aut Records, 2021) draws on concerts and sessions from 2013 and 2016 and was issued in an edition of 300.

Puglisi teaches jazz piano; his Aut Records and All About Jazz biographies name the Frescobaldi Conservatory in Ferrara and Siena Jazz University. One of his students was the Bologna pianist Dimitri Sillato, who cites private jazz and free-improvisation lessons with him. His Discogs biography adds that he has recorded more than fifty CDs and played festivals across Europe and in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Senegal, Egypt, Morocco and Turkey. Collaborations named in his biographies, but not in Discogs release credits, include Steve Lacy, John Zorn, William Parker, Hamid Drake, David Murray, Dave Liebman, Paolo Fresu and Flavio Boltro.

Discogs files most of his credits under Jazz, with styles led by Free Improvisation, Contemporary Jazz, Avant-garde Jazz and Free Jazz, and that is a fair summary of the range. On the free side he plays prepared piano, toy piano and objects (the Elements credits list "toys" and "objects", and the Van Veenendaal duets are literally for prepared, unprepared and toy pianos) and works in open trios with Bennink and Glerum or Bosetti and Calcagnile. On the repertoire side he keeps returning to Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, whose pieces show up on Laiv, Elements, Saints And Sinners, Sento Doppio and Plays Ellington, and to Charlie Haden's songbook for Rope's 2021 record. Cecil Taylor is the reference point named in his biography, and Giallo Oro, where extra percussionists and a vibraphone surround the piano, is the record where his rhythmic side is most audible.

His interests run past jazz. He played keyboards on two records by Bologna's Deus Ex Machina, the progressive-rock band, Equilibrismo Da Insofferenza (Kaliphonia, 1998) and Impăris (Cuneiform, 2008), and he appears on projects with Ethiopian singer Gabriella Ghermandi (Maqeda, 2024), the Bologna-based Fawda trio, which draws on Gnawa music, and Vocione, the duo of vocalist Marta Raviglia and trombonist Tony Cattano. Those records are evidence of a working musician's range rather than a second identity: the leader records, the teaching posts and the jazz-press coverage all sit inside creative jazz.