Margherita Fava was born on October 16, 1995, in Follina, a village of fewer than 4,000 people in the Alpine foothills of the Treviso province, in Italy's Veneto region. Both of her parents are classical musicians specializing in baroque repertoire, her father a violinist and her mother a cellist and singer, and Fava grew up around their instruments without being pushed toward any of them. She started classical piano at 10 and picked up electric bass as a teenager. At 17 her parents enrolled her in a summer jazz workshop in Venice sponsored by the New School in New York, where the pianist Aaron Goldberg judged her audition and, after she played a classical piece rather than a jazz standard, assigned her to learn Miles Davis's trumpet solo on "So What" by ear. She has described that assignment as the moment she committed to jazz.

A scholarship brought her to Michigan State University in 2016, where she studied under bassist Rodney Whitaker, director of the school's jazz studies program, and pianist Xavier Davis, completing a bachelor's degree before moving on to a master's in jazz studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. There she studied composition with saxophonist and clarinetist Gregory Tardy, who has said every composition she turned in for his class "sounded like something very mature that could be recorded." She completed the degree in May 2022.

Her debut album, Tatatu (Caligola, 2023), was self-produced and self-financed, with Whitaker producing. It is a quartet date with Tardy on tenor saxophone and clarinet, Javier Enrique on double bass and Michael J Reed on drums, pairing six original compositions with Thelonious Monk's "Rhythm-A-Ning" and the standard "All The Things You Are." Its title is a word Fava coined as a toddler, meaning roughly "let me do it by myself." The record earned four-star reviews from both DownBeat and All About Jazz, and Italy's Musica Jazz named her among the country's most promising young jazz talents of 2023 and ran a dedicated interview with her.

Fava is now based in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she works full time as a pianist, composer and educator. She teaches jazz piano at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee, has directed the Knoxville Jazz Workshop since 2024, performs and organizes with the nonprofit Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, coordinates the NXT GEN concert series showcasing her own compositions and arrangements with local musicians, and hosts the jazz program "On Keys" on the public radio station WUOT.

Her second album, Murrina (Caligola), followed in October 2025. Where Tatatu was a quartet record, Murrina moves Fava to the head of a piano trio with bassist Brandon Rose and drummer Jonathan Barber, joined on individual tracks by guest saxophonist Bob Reynolds and synthesizer players Taber Gable and Jeff Babko. Of its nine tracks, six are originals; the other three are Duke Ellington's "Satin Doll," an arrangement of a piano intermezzo by Johannes Brahms that she has described as a tribute to her classically trained parents, and "Alter Ego" by the Memphis pianist James Williams. The title track is dedicated to trumpeter Tom Harrell; a brief, unplanned studio fragment recorded by the engineer became "Murrina Reprise." Musica Jazz's Ivo Franchi reviewed the record favorably, singling out the ballad "Yarn" and the Cedar Walton-influenced "Foreshadow."

Fava plays in a modern, mainstream-leaning jazz piano style that Musica Jazz's review of Murrina described as "poised between exploration and tradition," built on a working balance of original writing and carefully chosen standards. Her own account of her formation runs through Miles Davis's mid-1960s quintet sound, absorbed note by note as a teenager, and she has cited pianist Cedar Walton specifically as the model behind "Foreshadow," one of her earliest compositions, which she has described as a study built on triads. The gap between Tatatu's quartet writing and Murrina's trio format shows in the arrangements: the debut leans on Tardy's saxophone and clarinet for color and contrast, while the trio record puts more weight directly on her own touch and comping, with the guest synthesizer and saxophone parts used sparingly rather than as a fifth voice throughout. Her choice of covers, ranging from Monk and Ellington to a classical Brahms intermezzo, reflects a musician trained equally in the jazz repertoire and in the baroque and classical tradition of her parents' household.