Born in Tlemcen, Algeria, Mario Forte started playing the violin at the age of three and went on to study music for twenty-two years, at five conservatoires, including the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, from which he graduated in 2010. His teachers included Didier Lockwood, Glenn Ferris, Dominique Juchors and Ida Haendel. Soon after graduating he was invited to teach at the university in Lausanne, and it was in Switzerland that he founded his own orchestra, the String Lab Ensemble. Although over the past decade he has lived and played in more than thirty cities, he has made New York his home.
His projects grow with his travels, and meetings with different people and many kinds of music shape his highly eclectic career: from performances of traditional Arab-Andalusian music in Morocco and a TV appearance on 2M with Gnawa musician Chada Alhan, to forty concerts of jazz and contemporary music in Mexico. In New York he works with many musicians, including Brazilian percussionist Sergio Krakowski, violinist Mark Feldman and Israeli clarinettist Anat Cohen. In France, where he recorded his first album with an orchestra of over a hundred musicians, he has played at many jazz festivals, including with Richard Bona and his band. In Switzerland, before the String Lab Ensemble, he founded the Artempo festival in 2015, where he performed and composed as artistic director. In Austria he worked with bassist Georg Breinschmid, including in a trio with Bulgarian pianist Antoni Donchev. He has also composed music for films and video. Besides his musical work, he is currently involved in producing a film that translates his ideas and personal vision of contemporary culture into images.
Mario Forte won 3rd Prize at the 2nd Zbigniew Seifert International Jazz Violin Competition in 2016 and 1st Prize at the 3rd edition in 2018.