Music Bio
Marina López is a Mexico City–born composer, educator, and writer whose work blends cultural memory, experimental systems, and reimagined Western forms to create immersive musical worlds.
A recipient of the Virginia B. Toulmin Orchestral Composition Commission, her Music has been played by orchestras across the country. Amongst them, the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra (Summermusik), the American Composers’ Orchestra, and the Monterey Symphony Orchestra.
Now based in Pittsburgh, PA, she is intimately involved with the local musical community. She has collaborated with many local acts such as the Chamber Orchestra of Pittsburgh, Nat28 Ensemble, the Carnegie Mellon University Contemporary Ensemble, the Carnegie Mellon University Philharmonic, Resonance Works, and Kamratōn Ensemble.
Her first opera, 'Not Our First American,' premiered at Pittsburgh Opera on April 13th, 2019, as part of Co-Opera, a year-long collaboration between Pittsburgh Opera and Carnegie Mellon’s Music and Drama departments. Her second opera, 'Rosa,' premiered in December 2022 by Boston-based opera company Whitesnake Projects.
From March to April of 2023, she was awarded a 50th Anniversary Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia. She was also a 2025 Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music (GLFCAM) Balheast Eeble Fellow.
She approaches each piece as its own system, a universe with its own set of rules that govern its unfolding through time. Her goal is always to make these systems intuitively perceptible to the audience. For example, in her piece Nieve (2023), she created a harmonic system based on snowflake crystals that governs not only pitch content but also the harmonic relationships that develop throughout the piece.
She is also interested in deconstructing and reconfiguring Western classical musical forms in unexpected ways. In her piece Folia (2020), she atomized the Renaissance dance form la folia, resulting in a fractal structure with smaller folias within larger ones.
From the fall of 2020 through the spring of 2021, she developed and led a music education after-school program with local nonprofit Casa San José, which serves the Latino community of the greater Pittsburgh area. She also developed similar curricula for Volta Music Foundation, which seeks to make music education accessible to students in need in Latin America and create music programs that help underserved communities in the US.
Extra Writing Bio
In the Spring of 2018 Marina’s poem Penance won First Prize at the university-wide Martin Luther King Jr. Writing Award at Carnegie Mellon University. In July of 2020, she published a personal essay in Publicsource, a local Pittsburgh magazine. The essay has since been translated into Spanish and published in Presente Magazine.
Marina has been involved with the Mad Women in the Attic writing workshops at Carlow University since the fall of 2019. In the fall of 2021, her poem Para mama Chole was be published in their Voices From the Attic biannual publication.
In April 2022 her poem 'Deep Cuts' was published as part of the 'Eco-Justice for all!' zine, a special project from poet laureate Celeste Gainey and City of Asylum Pittsburgh. Her poetry was also been published in Empyrean Magazine's Second Issue in the Summer of 2022.
Marina expects to continue her writing journey alongside her composition career, sharing and publishing her poetry and fiction both in English and in Spanish.