Sergio Munafò is a Sicilian jazz guitarist, composer and educator who has spent four decades inside Palermo's jazz scene as a performer, bandleader and teacher. Born in Palermo on May 12, 1963, he picked up the guitar as a self-taught twelve-year-old, playing in a small Catania-area band alongside future Denovo founders Mario Venuti and Tony Carbone before formal study in Palermo with the Argentine conductor Vincent La Ferla and Maestro Norino Buogo. In 1985 he enrolled in the jazz program at Palermo's Brass Group school and over the following years attended seminars with John Scofield, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Ralph Towner, Vic Juris and Mick Goodrick, alongside Italian guitarists Gigi Cifarelli, Umberto Fiorentino, Fabio Mariani and Fabio Zeppetella. He earned a three-year degree in jazz music from Palermo's state conservatory, then named "Vincenzo Bellini" (renamed "Alessandro Scarlatti" in 2018), in 2008, graduating 110/110 cum laude.

Munafò has built a parallel career teaching jazz guitar in Palermo: at the Centro Studi Musicale and the Fitzgerald Music Academy in nearby Trapani (1996-1998), as a jazz guitar instructor at his own alma mater, the state conservatory (2011-2013), and for more than two decades (1998-2022) at the Scuola Popolare di Musica of the Fondazione The Brass Group. He currently serves as artistic director of the Brass Group's Blue Brass jazz club in Palermo.

As a performer, Munafò has been a guitarist in the Orchestra Jazz Siciliana, the Brass Group's resident big band, winning a standing chair through the orchestra's own audition process. In 2009 he played as featured soloist alongside drummer Peter Erskine and percussionist Alex Acuna at a Teatro di Verdura concert in Palermo that was issued as a live album, and in a later season he recorded another live Teatro di Verdura set, Three Drums Show, again with Erskine and Acuna alongside drummer Gianluca Pellerito. The orchestra's own artist association lists a long roster of international names Munafò has performed alongside over the years, among them Ron Carter, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Diane Schuur, Patti Austin, Dianne Reeves, Martial Solal, John Clayton, Stefano Bollani and Paolo Fresu, plus Dave Weckl, Jon Faddis and Kurt Elling, among dozens of others - this roster is self-published by the orchestra's own association and documents the ensemble's guest list rather than a release-by-release, individually confirmed credit for Munafò on each engagement. Outside the orchestra, he has performed multiple times in small-group settings with the veteran Milanese guitarist Franco Cerri, including a 1998 concert in Valderice and a 2001 pair of dates in Gibellina, and separately with guitarists Sandro Gibellini and Eddy Palermo. He has also collaborated with saxophonist Pietro Tonolo on a 2005 Egea Music recording of the tune "Un giorno feriale," and for more than thirty years with Sicilian saxophonist Orazio Maugeri.

Munafò has released three albums under his own name: Blue Flat (2004, AWM), produced by the Associazione Culturale Wes Montgomery, the Wes Montgomery tribute society he himself presides over, and featuring Maugeri; Light Frames (recorded 2014, released 2015, Comar 23), credited to the Sergio Munafò Quartet with Turin-born drummer Enzo Zirilli, and, per the album's own streaming-platform credits (Apple Music, Deezer), saxophonist Claudio Giambruno and organist Angelo Cultreri - this release does not appear in the Discogs database, so the personnel above is sourced from streaming metadata rather than an independently cross-checked discography entry; and Valzer d'Amor (2019, Comar 23), a Discogs-verified session with drummer Enzo Zirilli and trumpeter/flugelhornist Alessandro Presti billed as special guests, alongside vocalist Pamela Barone, guitarist Alessandro Stagno, pianist Giovanni Conte, bassist Stefano D'India and percussionist Vincenzo Palermo. His own quartet also contributed a single track, "T.A. 37," to the various-artists compilation Sicilian Jazz Collection Vol. 1 (1993, Splasc(h) Records), and as a sideman he played guitar on Palermo vocalist Gaetano Riccobono's 1997 debut That's Life, a collection of Broadway and American songbook standards that also credited tenor saxophonist Francesco Bearzatti and pianist/arranger Giovanni Mazzarino - both the Valzer d'Amor and That's Life credits are independently confirmed at the Discogs release level.

Munafò describes himself as a follower of the "old school" American jazz guitar language, drawing on Wes Montgomery, George Benson, Joe Pass and Barney Kessel - an allegiance formalized by his presidency of Palermo's Wes Montgomery cultural association. His recorded work favors standards and original melodic material over dense harmonic abstraction: Valzer d'Amor mixes Duke Ellington's "I'm Beginning to See the Light" and originals with Italian songbook staples by Gino Paoli and Lucio Battisti, and a review in Note in Vista praised the album's "no filter" approach, calling Munafò's improvising emotionally direct and "without resorting to hackneyed affectations." Discogs tags Valzer d'Amor as Latin Jazz, a description that fits the album's bossa-inflected rhythm section work from bassist Stefano D'India and percussionist Vincenzo Palermo as much as its guitar language.