Jessie Marino is a Berlin-based composer, performer, and media artist. Her compositions and solo performances abstract ideas drawn from all stripes of popular culture and political discourse, girded by a definitively humanistic sensibility rife with equal doses of wit and pathos. Marino’s pieces score out sound, video, story, lighting, and staging, treating each of these elements as expandable musical materials. She transcends the conventional materials of composition to help audiences locate music in the most commonplace activities and relations.
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Marino’s work has recently been commissioned by The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), ox&öl productions (CH), Donaueschingen Musiktage (DE), Minu Festival for Expanded Music (DK), Ensemble Tzara (CH), Plus Minus (UK), ECLAT Festival, Festival für Immaterielle Kunst (DE), Ultima Festival (NO), Darmstadt International Summer Course (DE), Borealis Festival (NO), G((o))ng Tomorrow Festival (DK), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK), Transit Festival (BE), and Look/Listen Festival (NYC). In 2020 Marino received the Fromm Composition Prize from Harvard University, and in 2018 she received the Rome Prize for musical composition at the American Academy in Rome.
Her work has made recent appearances at the BAM! Festival for MusikTheater (Berlin), Festival Musica (Strasbourg), Heroines of Sound (Berlin/MX), Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Contemporary Series and her pieces have been performed by formidable ensembles such as Pinquins (NO), Plus Minus (UK), Decoder Ensemble (DE), Speak Percussion (AU), KNM Ensemble (DE), SCENATET (DK), SoundInitiative (FR), TAK Ensemble (USA) We Spoke Percussion (UK), Line Upon Line Percussion (USA), Wild Up (USA), eighth blackbird (USA), Decoder Ensemble (DE), Ensemble Adapter (DE), Die Ordnung Der Dinge (DE), Zwerm Electric Guitar Quartet (BE), Retro Disco (CH), and Ensemble Pamplemousse (USA).
Jessie has parlayed her interest in expanding compositional practice beyond sound into educational pursuits, teaching and guest-lecturing at academic institutions like the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Chicago, the Hochschule Für Musik und Tanz Köln as well as co-teaching for the Chicago chapter of TECHNE, a non-profit organization devoted to introducing female-identified youth to the rudiments of technology-focused art making, musical improvisation, and community collaboration. From 2021-2022 she was a guest Professor in Experimental Performance Practice at the Staatliche Hochschule Für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart.
Jessie was an artist-in residence during the 2023-2024 Season at the Experimental Media and Performing Art Center (EMPAC). In 2020 Marino received the Fromm Composition Prize from Harvard University, and in 2018 she received the Rome Prize for musical composition at the American Academy in Rome. She has been an artist in residence at the Villa Sträuli (CH), Headlands Center for the Arts (CA), Avaloch Farm Music Institute (NH), and the Albatross Artists Residency Program. Jessie has performed internationally as a solo artist as well as a member of Ensemble Pamplemousse (co-artistic director and member from 2006-2019). She has worked closely with composers such as Alvin Lucier, George Lewis, Klaus Lang and Steven Takasugi, and has been a guest performer with prominent contemporary music and theater ensembles such as Object Collection (NYC) and Wet Ink Ensemble (NYC).
Marino studied experimental music and composition at Wesleyan University with Alvin Lucier and Ronald Kuivila and she earned a DMA in musical composition from Stanford University, working with sound artist Paul DeMarinis.