Marco Colonna was born in Rome on December 21, 1978, and started classical clarinet lessons at age eight. He turned to jazz in his mid-teens, studying tenor saxophone from 1995 with Piero Quarta and baritone saxophone and orchestral playing from 1996 with Gaetano Zocconali, before earning his diploma at the Licinio Refice Conservatory in Frosinone. He rounded out his training in seminars with Achille Succi and Alfredo Impulliti, and studied contemporary bass clarinet technique directly with Harry Sparnaay, the Dutch player widely credited with establishing the bass clarinet as a solo concert instrument.

Colonna's public career opened at the 1997 Rumori Mediterranei Festival, and he went on to work with the Orchestra Laboratorio di Siena Jazz before joining cornetist and conduction pioneer Butch Morris's orchestra in 2003. He co-founded the Improvising Experimental Machine ensemble and organized improvised-music events at Rome's Rialto Sant'Ambrogio cultural center, building the network of relationships that still shapes his working groups today.

He released his first album as a leader, Domino's Tales, in 2011 on the UK label Slam Productions, and has been prolific since: well over forty albums as a leader or co-leader, recorded for a run of European free-improvisation imprints that includes Leo Records, Not Two Records, Relative Pitch Records, Fundacja Sluchaj, Setola Di Maiale and Plus Timbre. In recent years he has concentrated on bass clarinet above all else, exploring its range from a handful of dedicated solo albums (Foraminifera, 2018; The Second Coming, 2019; Fili, 2020) up through large-ensemble settings.

Two long-running duo and trio partnerships anchor his catalog. With Catalan pianist Agusti Fernandez he recorded the duo album Desmadre (2014, Fonterossa Records) and the live Birth Of Shapes (2016), then joined Fernandez and Slovenian drummer-percussionist Zlatko Kaucic for the trio album Agrakal (2018, Not Two Records), recorded live at the Novara Jazz Festival. With British pianist Alexander Hawkins he recorded Dolphy Underlined (2020, Fundacja Sluchaj), a duo set built entirely from Eric Dolphy compositions plus one Colonna original written in Dolphy's idiom. Coltrane gets the same treatment on two solo records, Playing Coltrane (2018, Manza Nera) and Offering (Playing The Music Of John Coltrane) (2021, Niafunken/Setola Di Maiale), the latter recorded live in a church in Castions di Strada, Udine.

His most recent working group is a quartet convened by the Area Sismica arts initiative in Forli with fellow reed player Edoardo Marraffa and drummers Fabrizio Spera and Marco Zanotti, documented on Red Planet (2023, Relative Pitch Records). Since 2015 he has appeared on Musica Jazz's year-end rankings of Italy's leading jazz musicians, moving into the magazine's top ten from 2017 and to third place in a 2019 poll of the country's best wind players.

Colonna's playing sits inside European free improvisation, built on an unusually wide command of the clarinet family - from contrabass clarinet up through sopranino saxophone - and on extended techniques including circular breathing. His two dedicated tribute projects, one to John Coltrane and one to Eric Dolphy (made with Alexander Hawkins), place him explicitly inside a lineage of reed innovators rather than treating free improvisation as a break from the jazz tradition. Reviewers have also pointed to circular-breathing and multiphonic techniques drawn from outside jazz altogether, and to open-form writing that leaves substantial space for group interplay, as throughlines across his catalog.

Beyond jazz and improvisation he plays folk music with the group Acquaragia Drom and has toured Mexico, the United States, Malaysia, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Germany in addition to Italy. He also runs a solidarity project called New Ethic Society and writes a blog subtitled "Parole, suoni, riflessioni, lotte" ("Words, sounds, reflections, struggles"), reflecting a political and social-justice commitment that runs alongside his performing career. All About Jazz's biography of Colonna also names Antonello Salis, Egberto Gismonti and Louis Sclavis among his collaborators; these are stated in his own published biography but are not independently confirmed here against a specific recorded credit.