Biography
Ms. Marin is a multifaceted violinist whose career has developed between her two passions: chamber music and pedagogy. She is a founding member of the Cuarteto Hispano, called the group in residence 2015 of the National Theater of Costa Rica. Together with the Costa Rican pianist and composer Pilar Aguilar, she maintains 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.
Grace 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, Amparo Lacruz and Andreu Riera, among others.
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, Ms. Marin has been concertmaster of the World Youth Day Symphony Orchestra (Madrid, 2011), also concertmaster of the Municipal Symphony Orchestra of Santa Ana (Costa Rica) and of the Symphony Orchestra of the Superior Conservatory of the Balearic Islands (Spain), and principal second of the Symphony Orchestra of the University of Costa Rica. 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.
Pedagogy is another of her passions and forms an important part of her work. 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. She is regularly invited to give master classes and participate in festivals as a violin and chamber music teacher in the International Festival of Music of Cobano (Puntarenas, Costa Rica), 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 was 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.
Grace Marín completed her undergraduate studies at the Hochschule fur Musik Nurenberg- Augsburg (Germany) and the Master in Musical Creation and Interpretation at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid (Spain). Ms. Marín is currently a member of the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra, and Teaching Assistant in the violin studio of Annie Chalex Boyle at Texas Tech University where she is pursuing her Doctor of Musical Arts degree.