Umberto Roberto (Roman) Romano, a painter, printmaker, sculptor, teacher and illustrator, was born in 1906 in Bracigliano, Italy and emigrated to America with his parents when he was a child. The family settled in western Massachusetts. He showed early interest in art, and as a teenager enrolled at the National Academy of Design in New York. A few years later he earned a Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship, which he used to study art in the museums in Europe. His work embraced a wide variety of styles and influences.

After his period in New York followed by travel, he settled in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1933. There he associated with painters and sculptors whose names remain famous as leading American artists: Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, Paul Manship and Milton Avery. These men influenced his styles and subjects, which included Art Deco, Cubism, Realism, Expressionism, and Regionalism. It is written that after he left Gloucester for Provincetown in the mid 1960s, his style became increasingly abstract.

In 1928, Romano had his first solo exhibition, which was held at New York's Rehn Galleries. The next year, he began giving art lessons on a boat in Rocky Neck, Massachusetts, and eventually in Gloucester, he purchased a larger space, the Gallery-on-the Moors, and opened the Romano School of Art. He also taught nearby at the Worcester Art Museum School and at the New York Academy of the Fine Arts in the 1930s.

Reportedly his teaching style was "charismatic and impassioned", and he was very helpful with his students, while insisting on quality of work. He insisted "that art was a like a foreign language that needed to be studied fully in order to have true fluency and understanding."

In 1935, Romano did work for the WPA including a six-panel historical mural at the Post Office Building in Springfield, Massachusetts. He also painted the official portrait of Sara Delano Roosevelt, mother of United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During World War II, he did paintings that increasingly reflected the turmoil he and others were experiencing with the sufferings of war victims. His work became darker and darker and more melancholic. In his painting, Cargo, his theme was a nearly naked, sun exposed Merchant Marine dying on a raft after Axis forces had sunk his ship. Additional painting was a Great Man Series, which included a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, done with a dribble technique, varied blue tones and heavy lines, all which contributed to a very introspective seeming figure. In the 1970s, he did a Glass Box Series where he placed representational "fragments" of humanity into glass cases.

His work is in many leading museums such as the Whitney, Smithsonian, and Cape Ann Historical Museum. His portrait of Abraham Lincoln is in the Presidential Library collection. Among his exhibition venues were the Carnegie Institute and Chicago Art Institute.