Marcela Hersch, a Mexican pianist and composer, was born to an American father and a Mexican concert pianist mother, Marcela Martínez Barranco. She began studying piano at the age of four under her mother's guidance and made her debut at the age of seven. In Mexico, she trained with renowned piano teachers Stella Contreras, Luz María Puente, and Aurora Serratos.

She graduated as a Concert Pianist from the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico and earned a Master's of Music in Piano Performance from Indiana University. In 2017, she graduated with honors from Colegio de Morelos (COLMOR) with a transdisciplinary Ph.D. dissertation combining philosophy, music, and miniature painting from India.

Throughout her career, she studied with distinguished international musicians, including Michel Block, Alfonso Montecinos (a pupil of Claudio Arrau), and Edith Picht-Axenfeld (a student of Wanda Landowska). Her composition studies were guided by Juan Carlos Areán and Mariana Villanueva, while she studied orchestration under Arturo Márquez. She has also conducted research on Indian Classical Music with Paul Livingstone and Hollving Argáez and explored pop music with Tony Bravo and jazz with Juan José Calatayud.

Marcela Hersch has released eight recordings on compact discs, five of which feature her own compositions. She has performed as an orchestral soloist since childhood and has given concerts in Mexico, the United States, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany, Cuba, and India. In 2012, she premiered her compositions in India, including solo piano works and "Tiger's Flower" and "So it is" for piano, sitar, tabla, and tanpura, featuring Shubhendra Rao (a protégé and top student of Ravi Shankar) on sitar and Zoheb Khan on tabla. In 2014, she performed in Delhi with an ensemble featuring tabla, soprano, tanpura, and electric guitar.

She began teaching piano at the age of fourteen, and since the age of twenty-four, she has continuously taught both privately and at her own music school, the Centre for Musical Education Pauta. Additionally, she was a faculty member at the Centro Morelense de las Artes University in Cuernavaca, Morelos, until 2020.