Marie Incontrera

Biography

Marie Incontrera is a musical theater and opera composer; music director and conductor; and screenwriter living in Manhattan, New York. Her award-winning chamber opera, Albert: Bound or Unbound, written with librettist Royce Vavrek, premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music New Wave Festival and was hailed by the New York Times for its “deftly woven jazz and gospel elements.” Her operatic works have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, and across the United States.

Marie has served as a music director and pianist for three works with Mabou Mines, in collaboration with late director Lee Breuer. She has also music directed several other opera, musical theater, and hybrid works, including Fred Ho’s Sweet Science Suite, Marat Sade with the TWEED Theatre Company featuring Edgar Oliver, Hatuey at Sundance Labs, and 8 Songs for a Drag Queen at Carnegie Hall.

Marie’s screen works include Two Anxious Bisexuals, and A Very Queer Holiday, a holiday special. Both were written with Dianne Gebauer and Megan A Zebrowski. Two Anxious Bisexuals has been a winner of Best Short Script at Film Invasion LA, Audience Choice at Cannes Short Film Festival, and others. A Very Queer Holiday was a winner at LGBTQ Unvordered International Film Festival, Vienna Film Festival, and others. A Very Queer Holiday is a participant in the Sundance Collab Film Producing: Core Elements intensive.

Marie is a graduate of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Intensive, taught by Patrick Cook and Frederick Freyer. Her first collaboration with book writer and lyricist Dorie Clark, Absolute Zero, was a part of the Apples and Oranges THEatre ACCELERATOR development intensive in Spring 2021. Absolute Zero was an O’Neill New Musical Theater Conference Semi-Finalist in 2023, the Second Prize winner of NMI’s Search for New Musicals in 2022, and the winner of the Spring 2022 Musicalwriters.com Pitch Night. Absolute Zero received a 29-hour reading from The York Theatre off-Broadway in April 2023, and will be showcased on the New York Theater Barn New Works Series in Fall of 2023.

Dorie and Marie were commissioned by the Prospect Theater Lab for the first ten-minutes of their second show, 23 and You and You and Me, which premiered in November 2021 at Symphony Space. Her Virtual Reality musical, Parallel University, written with David Quang Pham and Malina Detcheva-Rossa, was developed with the Across A Crowded Room program at Lincoln Center Library. She received her Masters Degree in Music Composition from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Tania Leon. She studied privately with jazz composer Fred Ho.

By day, Marie owns a social media and digital marketing agency.