Rosario Di Rosa was born on February 8, 1975, in Vittoria, a town in the Sicilian province of Ragusa. Largely self-taught at the start, he came to jazz piano under the guidance of Salvatore Bonafede, one of Sicily's leading jazz pianists, studying with him for four years and making his first appearances in Sicilian groups led by trumpeter Vito Giordano. He went on to earn an architecture degree from the University of Palermo in 2002 and later graduated with top honors in jazz piano from the Conservatorio Giuseppe Nicolini, alongside private study that also drew on classical piano and composition.

His early recognition came fast: in 1999 he won a scholarship as best pianist at the Nuoro in Jazz festival, and he spent time playing in drummer Mimmo Cafiero's Open Jazz Orchestra. In 2003 he placed second at Milan's Jazz Dimensione Giovani competition as a duo with flautist Carlo Nicita, a partnership that produced his first two albums as a co-leader: Voices (2004, Splasc(h) Records, with trumpeter Giovanni Falzone as a guest) and Unquiet Serenade (2006, Abeat Records, billed to the Carlo Nicita Rosario Di Rosa Sextet with bassist Yuri Goloubev, drummer Cristiano Calcagnile, saxophonist Carmelo Coglitore and Falzone again). Unquiet Serenade was named among the year's best albums in Musica Jazz's Top Jazz poll, with Di Rosa also recognized in the magazine's Best New Talent and Best Composer of the Year categories. That same year, 2006, he was selected among 50 young pianists worldwide to compete in the Martial Solal International Jazz Piano Competition in Paris.

In 2008 he founded the Rosario Di Rosa Trio with bassist Paolo Dassi, debuting on Freedom - Improvised Suites for a Trio (2008, Abeat Records, with drummer Jimmy Weinstein) and continuing with drummer Riccardo Tosi from Cabaret Voltaire (2010, Abeat Records) onward. The trio's Pop Corn Reflections (2015, Nau Music Company), which drew on the minimalism of Steve Reich and early-20th-century twelve-tone technique, placed second among the year's best jazz ensembles in Musica Jazz's Top Jazz 2015 referendum. Alongside the trio, Di Rosa led the larger seven-piece Contemporary Kitchen on Yawp!!! (2012, Abeat Records), an original suite about emigration inspired by Walt Whitman, featuring reed player Piero Bittolo Bon, multi-instrumentalist Paolo Botti, organist Alberto Gurrisi and vocal guests Le Sorelle Marinetti; the album was voted among the year's best by Jazzit magazine, one of three Jazzit Awards Di Rosa received across 2010, 2012 and 2015. He also appeared as a sideman on clarinetist Adalberto Ferrari's Wanderer (2013, Zone Di Musica, as Adalberto Ferrari's LIQ).

From the late 2010s his work increasingly folded electronics into the acoustic trio format. Crossroad Blues (2019, Deep Voice Records), billed to Rosario Di Rosa Basic Phonetics with Carlo Nicita on flutes and electronics, guitarist Alberto Turra and vocalist Sarah Stride, blended improvisation, electronics and classical elements into what reviewers described as a hypnotic, post-progressive sound world. That shift continued into Zehra (2020, Deep Voice Records, with drummer Stefano Grasso, billed to the duo H'Um) and Studio disarmonico di un attimo (2021, Slowth Records, credited to U/nu, an electroacoustic alias under which Di Rosa presents his own sound-art work and on whose Discogs release he is credited as mixing and mastering engineer). I Want To Hear And See Everything (2024, Shimmering Moods Records) is a solo work in the same electroacoustic vein. In parallel with his recording career, Di Rosa has attended courses with British pianist Keith Tippett and has performed alongside European free-improvisation figures including pianist Marilyn Crispell and saxophonist Evan Parker; these connections are documented in interviews rather than in Discogs session credits, so they are reported here as stated rather than independently verified through recording credits.

Di Rosa's own discography reads mostly as straightforward Jazz on Discogs, with his trio albums tagged Contemporary Jazz and his 2019 Crossroad Blues explicitly tagged Avant-Garde Jazz; his named influences, by his own account, run from Herbie Hancock (a teenage discovery of Head Hunters that he has described as transformative) and Martial Solal to his teacher Salvatore Bonafede and fellow Italian pianist Franco D'Andrea. That mainstream-to-modern piano-trio lineage sits alongside a second, increasingly prominent thread: formal study and performance contact with the European free-improvisation scene (Keith Tippett, Marilyn Crispell, Evan Parker), and, from the late 2010s on, a parallel career as an electroacoustic composer and sound artist, often performing and releasing under the alias U/nu, in which he treats sound itself as a malleable, technologically mediated material rather than a purely acoustic one.