A publicist, journalist, lecturer and author, Annamaria Testa started as a copywriter in 1974 and founded her own advertising agency in 1983.

She has taught at La Sapienza University in Rome, the University of Turin, IULM University and Bocconi University in Milan, focusing on political communication. Her work is cited in more than 200 scholarly papers surveyed by Academia.edu.

In 2008, she opened the website Nuovo e utile, on which she has published more than 700 articles dedicated to creativity, communication, and its surroundings.

As a journalist, she has written for many newspapers and has been a contributor to the weekly magazine Internazionale since 2012. In 2015, she designed and launched the nonprofit initiative #dilloinitaliano, against the pervasive spread of Itanglish. Since 2016 she has been part of the Incipit Group of the Accademia della Crusca, and has been a consultant for the Turin Book Fair since 2016.

She has published numerous books on creativity and communication, including La parola immaginata [The Imagined Word] (Il Saggiatore), which has become a classic for generations of publicists, La trama lucente [The Shining Thread] (Rizzoli, 2010), Minuti scritti. 12 esercizi di pensiero e scrittura [Written Minutes: 12 Exercises in Thinking and Writing] (Rizzoli, 2013) and with Garzanti Il coltellino svizzero. Capirsi, immaginare, decidere e comunicare meglio in un mondo che cambia [The Swiss Army Knife. Understanding, Imagining, Deciding and Communicating Better in a Changing World] and Le vie del senso [Ways of Meaning].

She has received numerous awards over the course of her long and impressive career, including the Excellence in Communication Award and the “Woman are the Web” Award.

In 2012, she was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Italian Art Directors Club, the first woman publicist in the Club’s twenty-five-plus years of existence. In 2013 Udi and the European Parliament awarded her the Immagini Amiche prize and Rai Storia dedicated an episode to her together with Emanuele Pirella.