Carla Marciano was born in Salerno on July 15, 1968. She started on piano at eleven, moved to alto saxophone soon after, and earned her diploma in clarinet from the Conservatory of Music in her hometown. In 1994 she was selected for a two-year professional development and qualification project in jazz and contemporary music directed by drummer Ettore Fioravanti and bassist Bruno Tommaso, and through it became part of Fioravanti's Matera Concert Band, playing Italian jazz festivals with the ensemble - an early training ground rather than a recording credit, but a real and documented one.

Her recorded catalog opens with Trane's Groove (2002, Dischi Della Quercia), a modal-jazz tribute to John Coltrane recorded with pianist Alessandro La Corte, bassists Aldo Vigorito and Dario Deidda, and drummer Donato Cimaglia. She has called it "my unpretentious but sincere tribute to John Coltrane." A Strange Day (2005, Black Saint) and Change of Mood (2007, Black Saint) followed on the same storied label that issued classic Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor recordings, both with a quartet of La Corte, Vigorito and drummer Gaetano Fasano - the trio she has built the rest of her career around - and Change of Mood carrying only her own compositions. A Strange Day made Cadence Magazine's top ten CDs of 2006, and Marciano placed in Top Jazz's "Best New Talent" poll in both 2005 and 2007.

Stream of Consciousness (2012, Alfa Music), her fourth album, is a live-in-studio quartet record of original material, its title track a three-part suite, and it won the JazzIt Award in 2012 before drawing a five-star review in the Russian magazine Jazz.Ru the following year. In 2013 the 35th Annual Jazz Station Awards named her among that year's Best Alto Saxophonists, in company with Phil Woods, Kenny Garrett, David Sanborn, Steve Coleman and Anthony Braxton. Her fifth album, Psychosis: Homage to Bernard Herrmann (2019, Challenge Records), marked her label debut there: the quartet's arrangements of Herrmann's scores for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Vertigo and Marnie, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Roy Boulting's Twisted Nerve, plus a closing homage to John Williams' Harry Potter theme, recorded at Zork Planet in Buccino, near Salerno, in September 2018. Jazziz called it one of the best jazz albums of its year, and DownBeat's Alain Drouot praised her "thick and broad tone as well as a fluid articulation."

Her sixth album as a leader, DAYDREAMING My Beloved Father GIOVANNI, is set for CD release on Challenge Records on September 25, 2026, with a double-vinyl edition following October 8. The eight-track suite is dedicated to her late father Giovanni, a physician who also played guitar and sang and who she has called "my true music teacher" - the source, she says, of "this fierce passion," and of having "dreams and pursu[ing] them with dedication and courage." Her regular trio of La Corte, Vigorito and Fasano is joined on five of the eight tracks by the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Teatro Giuseppe Verdi in Salerno, conducted by Antonio Sinagra, and by bassist Dario Deidda as a guest on the track "Flowers from the Sky." As of this build the album had not yet reached its release date, so it carries no Discogs entry and no confirmed streaming links; see discography-full.md.

Alongside her quartet's own catalog, Marciano appears on the various-artists LP LuccaJazz Donna - Anno 2010 Vol. I (2011, Girasuoni) and as a guest on pianist Alessandro La Corte's own Smile in Winter (2017, Alfa Music), and the title track of Trane's Groove was reissued in 2021 on the compilation Spiritual Jazz 13: Now! Part Two. She has toured the United States and Russia, performed as a featured soloist with the Orchestra Civica at Milan's Piccolo Teatro Strehler, and in 2019 was the sole international guest at the Afrolect International Jazz Festival in Nairobi National Park, Kenya, where the Italian Cultural Institute also had her lead a masterclass at the Kenya Conservatoire of Music. In 2006 the Italian Cultural Institute of New York invited her to represent Italian women in jazz at Symphony Space on Broadway. She has received the Premio Internazionale Principessa Sichelgaita (2010) and a medal from the Presidency of the Italian Senate the same year, the Premio Mulieres Salernitanae and the Premio Baronissi Summer Jazz (both 2023), and the Premio Salerno Jazz (2024), and has placed repeatedly in Musica Jazz's "Best Italian Talent" reader poll.

Marciano's playing is built on the modal language of John Coltrane, stated outright on her debut and audible throughout a catalog she has otherwise filled with original compositions rather than repertoire. She is one of the few working jazz musicians anywhere who plays sopranino saxophone as a regular voice alongside alto, not as a novelty doubling. Critics have repeatedly singled out the same two qualities: a thick, forceful tone and a fluid technical command that lets her move between hard-driving post-bop lines and more open, free-leaning stretches, as on Stream of Consciousness's title suite. Psychosis showed a different side of the same instinct, turning Bernard Herrmann's and John Williams' film themes into vehicles for quartet improvisation rather than straight orchestral transcription, and DAYDREAMING extends that range further still, setting her working trio against a full string orchestra for an extended, explicitly personal suite.