Marianne Solivan is a jazz vocalist, composer and educator born in Queens, New York, whose family lived in Venezuela and New Jersey before settling in Massachusetts, where she attended high school. Already an alto saxophone student, she began singing seriously in secondary school, studying classical voice and appearing in musical theater productions. She earned a BA in music education and vocal performance from Berklee College of Music, then taught music for a year before entering the New England Conservatory, where she completed a master's degree in jazz studies.

In 2007 Solivan moved back to New York City, the city of her birth, and placed in the Jazzmobile Vocal Competition. That same period, she was the sole featured vocalist on clarinetist Darryl Harper's Stories in Real Time (2009, HiPNOTIC Records), recorded with Harper's C3 Project. In 2008 she also joined the jazz trio for director Arthur Nauzyciel's staging of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at the American Repertory Theater, singing alongside guitarist Eric Hofbauer and bassist Blake Newman; the production toured extensively in France in the years that followed.

Solivan's debut album as a leader, Prisoner of Love (2012, HiPNOTIC Records), was produced by trumpeter Jeremy Pelt and featured Christian McBride and Ben Wolfe on bass, Johnathan Blake on drums, Peter Bernstein on guitar, and Michael Kanan and Xavier Davis on piano. DownBeat gave it four stars in its September 2012 issue, calling it "probably the best vocal jazz record of the year." Her second album, Spark (2014, HiPNOTIC Records; reissued 2017, Playaudio), was recorded with her working band of pianist Xavier Davis, bassist Matthew Parrish and drummer Gregory Hutchinson. In 2019 she appeared as featured vocalist on two tracks of the Italian jazz-hip-hop duo Bardamù's album Stray Bop, "Stray Bop" and "And We Will Dance the Love."

That same February, Solivan recorded her third album, Mood for Love, at Riverside Studio in Turin, Italy, with pianist Massimo Faraò, bassist Nicola Barbon and drummer Roberto "Bobo" Facchinetti; Venus Records released it in Japan more than four years later, on December 20, 2023. Her fifth album, Re-Entry (2024, Mighty Quinn Records), paired her with guitarist Leandro Pellegrino, bassist Steve Wood, drummer Jay Sawyer and saxophonist Alex Terrier, in a set that draws on her Puerto Rican heritage alongside straight-ahead jazz repertoire. Her sixth, Break's Over (Imani Records), followed on January 17, 2025, a trio recording with bassist Buster Williams, pianist Brandon McCune and drummer Jay Sawyer.

Alongside her recording and performing career, Solivan founded JazzVox Studios, a vocal-arts teaching space for jazz singers, and created the MS Jazz Vocal Workshop and the Jazz Vocal Repertoire Hang, both based in Manhattan. Since the fall of 2020 she has also been a member of the jazz voice faculty at Syracuse University's Setnor School of Music, commuting from her home in Brooklyn to teach in the Jazz and Commercial Music Department. In 2026 she joined guitarist Roni Ben-Hur's touring sextet for a performance of Ben-Hur's Abriendo Puertas material at Dizzy's Club, Jazz at Lincoln Center, on June 25, 2026, singing alongside Ingrid Jensen on trumpet, Ray Gallon on piano, Martin Wind on bass and Jason Tiemann on drums. Solivan does not appear on the Abriendo Puertas studio album itself (Dot Time Records, 2026), which was recorded in Havana with an all-Cuban band led by pianist Alejandro Falcón.

Solivan's singing draws consistently on comparisons to Ella Fitzgerald's swing, Betty Carter's daring and Carmen McRae's directness, and trumpeter Jeremy Pelt has called her "the modern-day paradigm to which all singers should aspire." Reviewers describe a hard-swinging, matter-of-fact delivery paired with a commanding stage presence, equally at home leading a working small group as she is in the more song-focused, ballad-heavy repertoire of an album like Mood for Love. Her later work, particularly Re-Entry and Break's Over, folds her Puerto Rican family background and original compositions into an otherwise straight-ahead, standards-rooted vocal jazz style, built around long-running working bands rather than one-off studio dates.