Born near Zurich, Swiss composer Cécile Marti developed a great passion for music at an early age thanks to the artistic environment within which she was raised. She learned how to play the violin and piano at the tender age of eight and discovered a fascination for contemporary music not long after. Marti's first musical sketches began to appear while studying violin in Zurich. She continued studying composition with Dieter Ammann at Hochschule Luzern-Musik and reached her Master in Music with Major Solo Performance Composition in 2010. She was working with Georg Friedrich Haas, Hanspeter Kyburz, Kaija Saariaho and Malcolm Singer. Marti completed her PhD at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London supervised by Julian Anderson in 2017. She then completed a postdoc under the guidance of George Benjamin at King's College in London until February 2020.

In 2008 Cécile Marti won the International Composition Competition for Orchestra at the 9th Weimar Spring Contemporary Music Days. She received an invitation in 2008 to the International Davos Festival "Young Artists in Concert". The awarded orchestral work „Bubble Trip“ was performed by Lucerne Symphony Orchestra (LSO) at KKL. The violin concerto „AdoRatio“ was performed by the Collegium Novum Zürich at Tonhalle Zürich and Lucerne Festival 2010.Her orchestral work „Wave Trip“ was performed in Sondershausen and Nordhausen, Germany in 2012. Her orchestral cycle including a five-voiced choir, called “Seven Towers”, was premiered in Biel 2016. The opening piece of this large scale format cycle of seven conjoined pieces and a total duration of 78 minutes, was premiered by the Symphony Orchestra Berne. The sixth piece had its premiere by the Geneva Camerata and was recently performed by Sinfonietta Basel. The most recent project is a full length narrative ballet. Her works have been performed in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Finland, UK, Russia, Poland, Japan and the USA. Her works were performed at Lucerne Festival, Festival Klangspuren Schwaz, Festival Musica Nova Helsinki, Festival reMusic St. Petersburg, Festival Warsaw Autumn, Murten Classics, Festival Zeiträume Basel and Contemporary Festival Zurich. Her orchestral works were conducted by Mario Venzago, Markus L. Frank, Michael Wendeberg, David Greilsammer, Baldur Brönnimann and Kaspar Zehnder.

Next to her compositions Marti is working as a stone sculptor. Since 2017 she has been working on projects combining her music with stone sculptures sculpted by herself. Recent projects were ‘Forming Sculpture-Sculpting Process’ for piano trio and ‘In Stein Gemeisselt’ for string quartet.

Cécile Marti was chosen to receive the Werkjahr Zürich given in 2011, a yearly stipend granted by the city of Zürich. She was 2011/2012 an artist in residence in London for six month supported by the Landis&Gyr Foundation. She received fellowships from the Albert Koechlin-Stiftung in Lucerne and the Swiss National Foundation. Marti was composer-in-residence with the Symphony Orchestra Biel/Solothurn in Switzerland for season 2015/16. She was invited for a residency at Bartels Foundation in Basel 2018. She has been awarded with the ‘Carte Blanche’ by Fondation SUISA for 2018/2019.