Maria Pia De Vito was born in Naples on August 17, 1960. She trained in classical music and opera and in the Neapolitan folk tradition at the same time, and began performing in 1976, at sixteen. That simultaneous double training is the key to everything that followed, because it left her without the usual choice between the two.

Her defining decision was to treat Neapolitan as a working language rather than as regional colour. Most singers who use a regional tongue deploy it for atmosphere across a track or two. De Vito built a fifty-year career on the proposition that Neapolitan can carry any material put into it, and then spent that career demonstrating it on progressively less likely repertoire.

Her earliest documented credit is from 1983, on an album by Eugenio Bennato, a central figure in the Neapolitan folk revival. Through the early 1990s she appeared on records by Tino Tracanna, Daniele Sepe and, in 1995, Pino Daniele's Non Calpestare I Fiori Nel Deserto. The connection to Daniele, the central figure in modern Neapolitan song, outlasted him: she appears on Rita Marcotulli's tribute A Pino (2016) and on Gonzalo Rubalcaba's Gonzalo Plays Pino (2025).

Her career then took a shape few would predict for a Neapolitan singer. She became a fixture in British jazz. Between 1996 and 1999 she made three albums with the English composer Colin Towns and his Mask ensembles, the last of them, Dreaming Man With Blue Suede Shoes, alongside Norma Winstone. She recorded three albums with the pianist John Taylor, among them Phoné (EGEA, 1998), the record that established her as a leader, and in 2000 the three-way Verso with Taylor and the American guitarist Ralph Towner. The longest of these partnerships is the duo with the Welsh pianist Huw Warren, which produced Diálektos (2008), with guest clarinettist Gabriele Mirabassi, and 'O Pata Pata (2011), featuring Towner, and has toured internationally for well over a decade.

In Italy she worked across the same years with Rita Marcotulli on the co-billed Nauplia (1995) and Triboh (1998), with Danilo Rea and Enzo Pietropaoli on So Right (2005), with Francesco Cafiso on a 2007 Casa del Jazz live date, and with Giorgio Gaslini and Paolo Fresu on Il Brutto Anatroccolo (2008). Her Discogs record also lists her as a member of the Paolo Damiani Ensemble.

In December 2012 she recorded in Lugano with the pianist François Couturier, cellist Anja Lechner and percussionist Michele Rabbia. ECM released the result in 2013 as Il Pergolese, produced by Manfred Eicher, with De Vito credited for voice, arrangements and liner notes. The record rebuilds the sacred and operatic music of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, who was born in Jesi in 1710, worked in Naples, and wrote the Stabat Mater in 1735, the year before he died of tuberculosis at twenty-six. The project could have failed as either jazz tourism in sacred music or as classical singing with improvised decoration. It avoids both, and the reason is her training: she was never required to choose a side.

Brazilian music entered her work well before it became a headline. She sang on Porto Da Madama (2015) alongside Guinga, Esperanza Spalding, Maria João and Mônica Salmaso, and on two InventaRio projects including one with Ivan Lins. In 2017 she released Core (Coração), featuring Chico Buarque. Eight years later she completed the logic of it with Buarqueana (Parco della Musica Records, 2025), an album of Buarque's songbook translated into Neapolitan and reinterpreted, with Buarque himself and Mônica Salmaso taking part. She did not cross into Portuguese; she brought the repertoire into her own language and its author came with it.

This Woman's Work (Parco della Musica Records, 2023) assembled a new quintet of Mirco Rubegni (trumpet), Giacomo Ancillotto (guitar), Matteo Bortone (bass) and Evita Polidoro (drums). It sets originals by De Vito and Bortone beside readings of Tony Williams, Ornette Coleman, Elvis Costello and Kate Bush, takes its title from Bush's 1989 song, and draws its texts from Virginia Woolf, Rebecca Solnit and Margaret Atwood. Its subject is the condition of women, and in an interview around its release she made the point that although jazz is played among equals on the bandstand, the world surrounding it remains a male one.

She remains highly active. Mare Aperto appeared in 2024 with Daniele di Bonaventura among the players, Coplas a lo divino the same year, and Buarqueana in 2025. Discogs credits her on 124 releases, 34 of them as leader or co-leader.

De Vito's instrument is unusually wide, and it has to be: her repertoire runs from eighteenth-century sacred writing to Ornette Coleman to Brazilian song, and each demands different things from a voice. What holds it together is that she approaches all of it as a jazz musician approaches a standard, as material to be re-set rather than reproduced.

The Neapolitan language is the constant. It functions in her work the way a particular horn does for an instrumentalist, as the specific timbre she thinks in. This is why the Buarque project is the natural endpoint of her career rather than a novelty: the whole point is that the translation runs inward, into Neapolitan, not outward into an international language.

Her two lineages are audible. From the classical and operatic side comes control of line, the ability to sit inside a written melody without jazzing it up defensively. From the Neapolitan folk side comes ornament, attack and a much rougher palette than a conservatory voice would allow. The British partnerships with Colin Towns, John Taylor and Huw Warren pushed her toward a spare, chamber-scale improvising context that suits both.