Rita Marcotulli started on piano at five and went through the classical track properly, training at Rome's Santa Cecilia Conservatory in the same city where her father worked as a sound engineer on sessions for Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone. She made her first recording in 1984 and turned professional the same decade, and by 1987 Musica Jazz magazine had already named her Italy's best new talent.

The touring came fast after that. In 1988 she spent the year on the road across the US and Europe with drummer Billy Cobham, showing up on his album Incoming. Over the years that followed she worked with Richard Galliano, Chet Baker, Kenny Wheeler, Peter Erskine, Steve Grossman, and Dewey Redman, building a resume that doesn't stay inside one country's jazz scene for long.

In 1994 she joined Enrico Rava as pianist on his quartet record Chanson, alongside accordionist Richard Galliano and bassist Enzo Pietropaoli. Two years later she walked onto the stage of Sanremo, Italy's biggest mainstream song contest, and duetted with Pat Metheny.

As a leader, her catalog runs from The Woman Next Door (1998) through Koinè (2002) to The Light Side of the Moon (2006), and for years she has kept a running duo with accordionist Luciano Biondini, still active on stages together. Her playing pulls from outside the American jazz canon too, with Brazilian, African, and Indian phrasing worked into the improvising rather than layered on top of it.

Alongside the jazz work, Marcotulli built a parallel career as a film composer. In 2010 she wrote the score for Basilicata Coast to Coast, Rocco Papaleo's comedy about a group of musicians walking the width of southern Italy. The score won Best Score at the Nastro d'Argento that same year, Best Soundtrack at the Ciak d'oro alongside Papaleo and Max Gazzè, and Best Composer at the David di Donatello the following year, again shared with Papaleo — three of Italy's biggest film honors, for one score, across two award seasons. She built that career by running two tracks in parallel rather than letting one swallow the other, the jazz work and the film work, neither treated as the side job.

Marcotulli's playing sits at the intersection of a rigorous classical foundation and an improviser's range: Brazilian, African, and Indian phrasing show up worked directly into her soloing rather than as surface ornamentation. Her long, ongoing duo with accordionist Luciano Biondini reflects a recurring interest in intimate, conversational two-instrument formats, a format she's returned to across decades rather than treating as a one-off project. Her film-scoring work — most visibly the Basilicata Coast to Coast soundtrack — feeds back into her jazz writing, giving her compositions a narrative, scene-setting quality alongside the improvisational one.