Jessie Marino is a Berlin-based composer, performer, and media artist. Her compositions and 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 Ensemble Musikfabrik, Ensemble Mozaik (DE) Lucerne Festival, BBC Radio 3, Jane in Ether, Wittener Tage für Neue Musik (DE), The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (NY), Ensemble Proton, (CH), Plus Minus (UK), and Donaueschingen Musiktage (DE).
Her work has made recent appearances at the Minu Festival for Expanded Music (DK), ECLAT Festival, Festival für Immaterielle Kunst (DE), Ultima Festival (NO), SPOR Festival (DK), 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). BAM! Festival for MusikTheater (Berlin), Festival Musica (Strasbourg), Heroines of Sound (Berlin/MX), Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra Contemporary Series. Her pieces have been performed by formidable ensembles such as Pinquins (NO), Speak Percussion (AU), KNM Ensemble (DE), SCENATET (DK), TAK Ensemble (USA), Ensemble Adapter (DE), and Ensemble Pamplemousse (USA) among others.
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 was a fellow in music 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), and the Avaloch Farm Music Institute (NH). Jessie has performed internationally as a solo artist as well as a member of Ensemble Pamplemousse (co-artistic director and member from 2006-2019).
Currently, Marino performs with an idiosyncratic bevy of stringed instruments and electronics. She is the newest member of Ensemble Adapter (since 2025), and recently founded an Expanded Music Theater duo with long time collaborator Constantin Basica called Exquisite Peanut, the band CAOUTCHOUC, with percussionist Serge Vuille, and Retirement, an experimental band based in Oslo focused on improvisation and feminist collaborative practices (with Inga Margrete Aas and Pinquins Percussion).
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.
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.