Marie François is a Belgian concert pianist known for energetic, narrative-driven performances and for repertoire ranging from Muzio Clementi and Frédéric Chopin to piano four-hands music and Romantic concertos. She began studying piano as a young child and has performed in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Luxembourg, Italy, Greece, South Africa, Ukraine, Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Her appearances have included the Small Hall of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest, the Queen Elisabeth Hall in Antwerp, B-Classic, the Miami Piano Festival, the Schiermonnikoog Festival, Piano Days Flagey in Brussels, and the Aurora Music Festival in Sweden. Among her concert highlights are Dmitri Shostakovich's First Piano Concerto with Dirk Brossé at Muziekcentrum De Bijloke in Ghent, collaborations with Herman Engels and Rik Ghesquière, and an appearance with violinist Geza Hosszu-Legocky at the Martha Argerich Festival in Hamburg. She has also performed with Tony Yike Yang and soprano Kelly Poukens; with Poukens, she won the Vrienden van het Lied prize in the Netherlands.
François earned her bachelor's degree summa cum laude at the Conservatory of Maastricht in 2015, where she studied with Joop Celis, and completed a master's degree summa cum laude in Belgium with Alan Weiss. Her further training included postgraduate study with Polina Leschenko in Antwerp, work with Elisso Virsaladze at the Fiesole School of Music, and study with Lilya Zilberstein in Vienna and during four summers at the Chigiana Musical Academy in Siena. She has also taken masterclasses with Elisabeth Leonskaja, Jan Wijn, Pavel Gililov, Alexander Melnikov, Yoheved Kaplinsky, Anton Nell, Alexander Moutouzkine, and Peter Donohoe. Pianist Sergio Tiempo has been an important artistic influence outside her formal studies. In 2024, she was a scholarship holder of the Bayreuth Festival.
Her debut album, Eclectic/Being Me, was released by Challenge Records International in 2019 and was selected by Apple Music as one of the world's ten leading classical albums of the month shortly after its release. It was followed by the EP Memories of Tomorrow in 2021 and the four-hands album Musical Friendship for Four Hands, made with French pianist Simon Adda-Reyss, in 2025. After a month-long immersion in Warsaw in 2023, she created the podcast project Who Doesn't Love Chopin's Nocturnes, which received the Belgian Podcast Award for Best Independent Story and led to her complete recording of Chopin's Nocturnes, issued worldwide in 2025 by Evil Penguin Classic.
In 2026, François is developing The Seasons of Tchaikovsky, a 360-degree multimedia project with Vonk&Zonen, four writers, and an illustrator, presented over the course of the year through De Standaard, NPO4, The Bulletin, and Pianist magazine. She is the first Classical Yamaha Artist in the Benelux. Critics and collaborators have praised her playing as emotional, intuitive, warm, refined, creative, and dynamically balanced.