Dr. Grace Marín is a multifaceted Costa Rican/Spanish violinist. Her career spans over 20 years as a performer, educator, and advocate for Latin American music. She has appeared as a soloist and chamber musician in major theaters and festivals across United States, Latin America, and Europe. Together with the Costa Rican pianist and composer Pilar Aguilar, she maintained a duo with which she toured Spain, England, Austria, France and Mexico and recorded. In 2012, the album Huellas en el mar, under the Ars Harmónica label, which contains music for violin and piano by Pilar Aguilar. With the baroque violin, she is a member of Syntagma Musicum in baroque music and in 2013, won the National Music Prize in Costa Rica. She has performed with Syntagma Musicum in theaters and communities throughout Costa Rica, as well as in Guatemala (2013), Ecuador (2014), Colombia (2015), Bolivia (2016), Mexico (2016), Panama (2017) and Cuba (2017). Together with the group she has recorded De aquí y de allá and in 2020 Convidando está la noche.

 

Dr. Marin has won several awards, including the “Andrés Segovia-José Miguel Ruíz Morales” award in violin (2007) and chamber music (2009), awarded by the International Spanish Music Course “Music in Compostela”. As a chamber musician she has shared the stage with renowned musicians such as: Agustín León Ara, Enrique Santiago, Josep Colom, Mark Morton, John Gilbert, Lisa Garner, Kim Walker, Daniel del Pino, Duo Hypatia, Annie Chalex Boyle, Amparo Lacruz and Andreu Riera, among others. She was also a founding member of the Cuarteto Hispano, called the group in residence 2015 of the National Theater of Costa Rica.

Dr. Marín is an advocate for Latin American music and presented her doctoral research, An Annotated Catalogue of Costa Rican Music for Violin and Piano at Texas Tech University where she recently completed her Doctor of Musical Arts degree. She has commissioned numerous works for violin and piano and string quartet and has premiered compositions by leading Costa Rican composers including Carlos Escalante, José Mora-Jiménez, Berny Siles, Mario Alfagüell, Patricia Molina, and Pilar Aguilar.

 

She has performed as a soloist with various orchestras including the Heredia Symphony Orchestra, Santa Ana Municipal Symphony Orchestra and the Balearic Islands Superior Conservatory Symphony Orchestra. In November 2017, she performed the world premiere of the Mawanda Concerto for violin and orchestra of the Costa Rican composer Pilar Aguilar accompanied by the Symphony Orchestra of the University of Costa Rica. As an orchestra musician, Dr. Marin has been concertmaster of the World Youth Day Symphony Orchestra (Madrid, 2011), Concertmaster of the Municipal Symphony Orchestra of Santa Ana (Costa Rica), Texas Tech University Symphony Orchestra (US), Symphony Orchestra of the Superior Conservatory of the Balearic Islands (Spain), and Guest Concertmaster with the West Texas Sympphony Orchestra. She has played as a guest violinist in the Balearic Islands Symphony, the Madrid Academic Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Costa Rica, Heredia Symphony, Abilene Philharmonic, West Texas Symphony and Amarillo Symphony Orchestras.

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Pedagogy is another of her passions and forms an important part of her work. Dr. Marín has served as violin professor at the University of Costa Rica and the National Music Institute (Costa Rica), Escuela Municipal de Musica Villanueva del Pardillo (Spain-Madrid) and Escuela Municipal de Musica de Andraxt (Spain-Mallorca), Escuela de Artes Integradas de Santa Ana (EMAI), and from 2021 to 2025, she was Teaching Assistant in the violin studio of Prof. Annie Chalex Boyle at Texas Tech University, where she taught as Graduate Part-Time Instructor violin, chamber music, and the course Musics of Latin America.

 

From 2014-2020 Marín was Professor of Violin at the Costa Rican National Institute of Music and since 2018 at the School of Music of the University of Costa Rica. Dr. Marin worked also in several music schools in Spain including Escuela Municipal de Musica Villanueva del Pardillo (Madrid) and Escuela Municipal de Musica de Andraxt (Mallorca). She is regularly invited to give violin and viola masterclasses and participate in festivals as a violin and chamber music faculty in the National University of Costa Rica, International Festival of Music of Cobano (Puntarenas, Costa Rica), University of Costa Rica- Sede de Occidente, the International String Festival of the University of Costa Rica (San José, Costa Rica), and the Naolinco International Music Festival (Veracruz, Mexico).

 

As an administrator, she served as the artistic director of the Agustín León Ara International Musical Performance Course, which took place in 2013, 2014 and 2016 in Costa Rica. Ms. Marin also organized and taught the 1st and 2nd "Violin Encounter" held in San José, Costa Rica with the Italian violinist Alessandro Bares and the 1st Chamber Music Workshop for pre-college students at the University of Costa Rica. Currently she is the Artistic Director and founder of the StringFest Academy, an online platform that offers masterclasses and workshops for string players in Latin America, Spain and USA.

Dr. Grace Marín earned her Bachelor’s degree from the Hochschule für Musik Nürnberg-Augsburg (Germany) and a Master’s degree in Musical Creation and Interpretation from the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, and her Doctorate of Musical Arts at Thexas Tech University. Dr. Marín is currently the newly appointed Concertmaster of Big Spring Symphony Orchestra, Instructor of the Musics of Latinamerica course at Texas Tech University, member of the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra, Syntagma Musicum CR, and ArtBeat, and she continues to work actively as a performer, educator, and researcher.

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