Carla Marcotulli was born in Rome in 1962 into a household already inside the recording business: her father, Sergio Marcotulli, was a sound engineer at Rome's Forum Studios, the facility Armando Trovajoli co-founded in 1970 with Ennio Morricone, where he built a career recording film composers including Morricone and Nino Rota. At sixteen she enrolled at the Frosinone Conservatory, studying flute for five years and taking a jazz course under Gerardo Iacoucci while soloing in the school's gospel choir and big band. She went on to earn a diploma in both classical and jazz vocal performance from the "Benedetto Marcello" Conservatory in Venice, and studied opera privately with several sopranos.

She started working Rome's jazz clubs in the early 1980s alongside a circle that included Giovanni Tommaso, Danilo Rea, Massimo Urbani, Nicola Stilo, Larry Nocella, and her own sister, pianist Rita Marcotulli. In 1983 she appeared alongside Chet Baker at Rome's Four Roses Jazz Festival, documented by a press-conference photograph she herself contributed to Saint Louis College of Music's jazz archive. The connection continued: singer Carmen McRae, who heard her around that time, invited her to duet at a Music Inn concert, and in early 1988 Marcotulli sang backing vocals on Chet On Poetry (Novus/RCA, released 1989), recorded at Rome's Forum Studios during Baker's final months — one of his last studio recordings, made a few months before his death that May. The session doubled as a family credit: Sergio Marcotulli engineered and mixed it, crediting father and daughter on the same Chet Baker record.

Her recorded debut as a leader, Flying (Fonit Cetra, 1987; commonly cited as a 1986 release), paired her voice with a quartet of Furio Di Castri on bass, Antonio Faraò on piano, Flavio Boltro on trumpet and flugelhorn, and Swedish drummer Anders Kjellberg. In 1990 she co-wrote "Dear Friends" with her sister Rita for the Marco Volpe Band's Exacting Work (Splasc(h) Records), with Danilo Rea on piano — a genuine songwriting credit shared between the two sisters, not just a family connection. Three years later she was the credited "special guest" vocalist on the Giovanni Tommaso Quintet's Over The Ocean (Red Record, 1993), alongside Roberto Gatto on drums, Danilo Rea on piano and Flavio Boltro on trumpet. In 1998 the two sisters worked together again from the other side of the credit sheet: Carla sang on Rita's own The Woman Next Door (Label Bleu), the album Rita recorded at Gil Evans' studio in Amiens.

Marcotulli's second album as a leader, How Can I Get To Mars? (ACT Music, 2008), was billed "Carla Marcotulli With Dick Halligan" — the American keyboardist, trombonist and Blood, Sweat & Tears alumnus produced and played piano throughout, with Peter Erskine on drums, Dave Carpenter on bass, Bob Sheppard on saxophone, and a string quartet arrangement. A decade later, Love Is The Sound Of Surprise (Parco della Musica Records, 2018) — her first new album in ten years, twelve songs mostly original, arranged by Halligan, including a "God Bless the Child" homage to Billie Holiday and "Vado di fretta," co-written with singer-songwriter Paolo Pietrangeli, whose own Tempo Sensibile she had guested on in 1999 — reunited her with Giovanni Tommaso on double bass and brought in trumpeter Aldo Bassi, saxophonist Pietro Tonolo, and Dick Halligan again, this time on piano and as co-producer with drummer Bruce Ditmas. Her most recent record, Legrand Romance (Caligola), is a duo with pianist Marcello Tonolo built entirely around the songs of French composer Michel Legrand, recorded in December 2025 at Bistudio in Mirano and released on 26 May 2026 — still active work, not a legacy release.

Alongside her own catalog she has guested widely: on saxophonist Nicola Stilo's Errata Corrige (1995), bassist Carlo Pasceri's Blue Challenge (1995), pianist Marcello Tonolo's Days (Music On Poetry) (1995), singer-songwriter Paolo Pietrangeli's Tempo Sensibile (1999), trombonist Luca Bonvini's The Mystic Trumpeter (2004), and, in a various-artists live set alongside Paolo Fresu, on Rememberin' Bicio (Live At The 4th Nord-Est Jazz-Fest) (Caligola, 2002). She has performed internationally in New York, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, and took part in a 2017 performance of Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts commissioned by Rome's Auditorium Parco della Musica. She teaches jazz singing ("Canto Jazz") at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, the same conservatory that trained her sister Rita on piano.

Marcotulli's catalog runs almost entirely through small dedicated jazz labels — Fonit Cetra, ACT Music, Parco della Musica Records, Caligola — with a vocal style shaped early by the American songbook tradition (Carmen McRae was a direct mentor-by-encounter) and by the cool, understated phrasing of the Chet Baker sessions she sang on as a young singer. How Can I Get To Mars? and Legrand Romance both lean into a chamber-jazz, string-and-piano-forward sound via her collaborations with American arranger-producers (Dick Halligan, Bruce Ditmas), while her earlier work with a straight-ahead Italian rhythm section (Flying, Over The Ocean) sits closer to the Rome jazz-club scene she came up in during the early 1980s alongside Giovanni Tommaso and Danilo Rea.