Since 1998, the Director of the Institute is Carmelo Giudice, pianist and member of the Consiglio Nazionale per l'alta formazione Artistica e Musicale (CNAM) (The National Board for Advanced Artistic and Musical studies)

The recent transformation of the Istituto Bellini into an Advanced Institute of Musical Studies of university level has opened up new prospectives and brought about the implementation of a development project that takes into account also the vastness of the territory involved (all of south-east Sicily) and the responsibility taken under its culture profile.

Under the profile of the prospective, the Institute, holder of the Erasmus University Charter and part of the European system of Academies and Conservatoires (effective member of the AEC), is intensifying its collaboration with other university Institutions on both local and international levels, and is bringing to completion the defining phase of a new teaching order that satisfies the homogeneous requirements that will characterize, from the year 2010 onwards, the common space for European University instruction.

Under the profile relative to the territory in question, one observes that the interest of the new generation towards music and the great demand of new admissions that manifests itself each year is certainly favorable to the increase in standard of the students enrolled through selection. This makes it easier to attain objectives of excellence, but draws attention to one fundamental aspect regarding which the Academic Board has elaborated a precise strategy: the Istituto Bellini must carry out, besides its institutional role as a college of advanced musical study with professional aims, the fundamental task of promoting musical culture, on both basic and intermediate levels, to the surrounding regions. To this aim, agreements of collaboration with organizations and institutions are already underway and intensifying, towards finally creating a network of operators that will put into motion a virtual mechanism of elaboration and diffusion of initiatives for musical formation and production of quality, in the conviction that music is a language that should enter in as a part of the basic patrimony of a person, as a citizen, from a very tender age, in the light of the teaching principals that have been shared for thousands of years of cultural tradition extending from Plato to the significant scientists of our present day. Therefore, already for some academic years, one witnesses an active unfolding of the Institute's energies even beyond the Turris eburnea, that will finally, through music, contribute to the conservation and development of Man's culture. Naturally, in order to reach this objective, the relations of collaboration, with other local institutions, that move in the same environment, (the Universita'  degli Studi of Catania, the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania, the Teatro Massimo Bellini, etc.), are considered important.

In the light of the strategies already outlined, the Istituto Bellini dedicates equal energy to teacher training in the field of musical culture and to the development of new music technologies and languages that form part of our times, offers full training according to the possibilities provided by the present teaching ordination, and carries out an intense activity of artistic production, of musicological research and of publicity.