Giuliana Soscia is a pianist, composer, arranger and jazz orchestra conductor from Latina, south of Rome, and a professor of jazz composition at the Conservatorio "G. Martucci" in Salerno. For most of her performing career she was better known as an accordionist. She played the instrument until 1 September 2017, when she gave it up after a retinal problem, and has since concentrated on piano, composition and conducting. Her own biography says she has been dedicated exclusively to jazz since finishing her jazz-composition studies, and the route there ran through classical piano and Italian dance music.

She began as a classical pianist, giving concerts from the age of fourteen, and graduated from the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome in 1988 with top marks. She completed a piano apprenticeship with Anna Maria Martinelli at the Respighi Conservatory in Latina, studied baroque interpretation with the harpsichordist A. M. Pernafelli, and worked with the pianist and composer Sergio Cafaro, who pointed her toward improvisation and jazz. In 1988 she won first prize at the Castel Sant'Angelo piano competition and at the Amici della Musica di Sorrento competition. She later earned a second-level academic diploma in jazz composition with full marks and honors.

The accordion came at about twenty-four, self-taught by choice. She has said that piano remained her first instrument. She spent three and a half years with the Orchestra Borghesi, a popular dance-music orchestra, as its first woman accordionist, recording several albums of her own compositions and playing more than a thousand concerts. A second stretch on Italian television and radio followed with a RAI orchestra. One of her solo accordion albums from her dance-music years, Rosso Rubino, is a set of valzer, mazurca, polka and tango dance pieces on the La Balera label, and Discogs files it as folk. In 2002 she says she became a Universal Music recording artist with a dance-music single built around the accordion; a 2003 Universal release credited to "Soscia" and listing her as composer and co-producer appears to be that single. She has described it as a bizarre detour she enjoyed. By her account she then committed to jazz as the form best able to hold what she wanted to say.

The jazz career centers on a partnership with the pianist, composer and arranger Pino Jodice, whom she hired as pianist for her first tango-jazz quartet, formed in 2006. In 2007 they founded the Giuliana Soscia & Pino Jodice Quartet, and a 2018 interview describes Jodice as her husband. The quartet's early records are tango-jazz: Latitango (Splasc(h), 2008), Antiche Pietre (Alfa Music, 2009), which All About Jazz Italy reviewed in March 2010 as a follow-up in the same vein, with two Astor Piazzolla compositions ("La Camorra III" and "Tres minutos con la realidad") and "Pantaleon," a piece dedicated to him, and Il Tango da Napoli a Buenos Aires (Alfa Music, 2010). Contemporary (Wide Sound, 2012) moves toward straight jazz originals. Il Viaggio di Sindbad (Alfa Music, 2012) adds the oud player Raed Khoshaba for a jazz-and-maqam program, and Sonata per Luna Crescente (2013) is a duo of the two leaders billed as "jazz for two keyboards." In 2010 the pair played the LuccaJazz Donna festival, which produced a shared LP with Carla Marciano and three other acts.

Their most ambitious project of the 2010s was Stabat Mater in Jazz, a reworking of Pergolesi's setting. It began after the Maestro Roberto De Simone encouraged them to look at Pergolesi around the composer's 300th anniversary in 2010; it grew from an accordion-and-piano version into a quartet with the singer Marina Bruno, the bassist Jacopo Ferrazza and the drummer Emanuele Smimmo, recorded live at the Cimarosa Conservatory in Avellino and released in 2014. The arrangements reharmonize the melodies with reference to John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" and "Naima." She played it in Jesi, Pergolesi's home town, on the evening she decided to stop playing accordion.

The Scottish saxophonist Tommy Smith is the other long thread. She appeared as a soloist with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, which he directs, on a 2008 Scottish tour of Omaggio ad Astor Piazzolla (Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stirling and St Andrews). The quartet's North Wind (Cose Sonore, 2017) is a quartet-plus-guest record on which Smith plays tenor saxophone and shakuhachi, with the bassist Luca Pirozzi and the drummer Valerio Vantaggio; Discogs credits both leaders as producers and arrangers.

In parallel she and Jodice built a Naples big band. The Orchestra Jazz Parthenopea, founded by the two of them, has about twenty musicians from southern Italy and keeps the accordion in a jazz orchestra deliberately, an idea they linked to Stan Kenton-era scoring and to Naples. Its live album Megaride (Cose Sonore, 2017; first issued by Jazzit Records with the March/April 2017 issue of Jazzit magazine) features Paolo Fresu on trumpet, flugelhorn and electronics, and Discogs credits Soscia as conductor of two tracks, "Lu Scottis" and "Variazioni / Sonata per Luna Crescente," and Jodice of the other five.

After 2017 her writing moved to the center. In 2016 she took a program of jazz compositions by women, Sophisticated Ladies, to India, and that led to the Giuliana Soscia Indo Jazz Project, an Italian-Indian ensemble that opened the February 2018 celebrations of seventy years of diplomatic relations between the two countries and toured Indian theaters. The album, released by BAM International in 2018, is seven original pieces for piano, the saxophonist Mario Marzi, the flutist and saxophonist Paolo Innarella, the bassist Marco de Tilla and two Indian musicians, the sitarist Rohan Dasgupta and the tabla player Sanjay Kansa Banik.

On 24 August 2019 she took first prize at Barga Jazz, an international composition and arrangement competition for jazz orchestra dedicated that year to the music of the trumpeter Dave Douglas, for her arrangement of his "Charms of the Night Sky"; according to her site she was the only woman among seven finalists. In 2020 she wrote, arranged and directed Belcanto & Jazz, a DVD and CD with the flutist Roberto Fabbriciani that recasts opera arias for flute and jazz quartet, recorded at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome. It won the jazz section of the Italian foreign ministry's Vivere all'italiana in musica 2020 call and was streamed by the Italiana and ITsART platforms and at the Lima jazz festival.

She has conducted the Orchestra Jazz della Sardegna in her own Small Orchestra Project at the Teatro Verdi in Sassari during the 2023 "(to) be in jazz" festival, the National Jazz Orchestra of the Italian Conservatories and the Orchestra Jazz Parthenopea. The orchestra's bassist Alessandro Zolo was part of that 2023 season, which included the Small Orchestra Project. In February 2024 the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra presented her music in two concerts in Cleveland, sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago. Among her earlier awards are the Sonerfisa Trophy in 2001 and a career prize in 2007 from the Castelfidardo accordion prize, the "European Personality" prize at Rome's Campidoglio and, per her biography, a critics' prize at the 2018 Orpheo Awards. She was named among Italy's best accordionists in the Jazzit Awards every year from 2011 to 2018.

She has taught at the conservatories of Perugia, Udine, Adria and Cosenza before Salerno and given master classes in Rome, Milan, Avellino, Potenza, Lima and Addis Ababa.

Discogs lists ten releases across her artist page and the two group pages she leads; eight of them are tagged Jazz. The exceptions are the accordion dance album Rosso Rubino (Folk) and the dance single (Electronic), which belong to the earlier chapter of her career.

Her writing draws on the classical piano training that came before any jazz, and the repertoire shows it: a Pergolesi reworking, opera arias set for flute and jazz quartet, and orchestral scores. Her site describes her Small Orchestra Project as an eleven-musician workshop that keeps to the traditions of the jazz orchestra while pursuing originality, alternating soloists' improvisation over the written harmonies with collective improvisation.

Tango is the first strand, with Astor Piazzolla as the reference. Antiche Pietre contains two Piazzolla pieces and "Pantaleon," which All About Jazz Italy says is dedicated to him, and Il Tango da Napoli a Buenos Aires pairs Neapolitan tunes with Argentine ones. The second strand is the Mediterranean and beyond: the Arabic maqam of Il Viaggio di Sindbad with Raed Khoshaba, the Indian raga and tala framework of the Indo Jazz Project with sitar and tabla, and the Scottish-Italian meeting of North Wind. The third is a stated advocacy: she has made a project of jazz composition by women (Sophisticated Ladies: A Tribute to Women Composers in Jazz, begun in 2014 for the Adkins Chiti foundation's Donne in Jazz series) and of women's place in the music.

By her own account she stopped playing accordion because she plays very physically and could not do that while worried about her retina. Piano now carries her small-group work, including a solo program, My Songs, and a trio built on the Sophisticated Ladies repertoire.