UTA music exec Dina Marto is the ‘great connector.’ Here’s why

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

The dinner is designed to provide an opportunity for women in leadership roles to connect and build relationships with their peers. They don’t need business advice, Marto said. They don’t need career skills. They just need connectivity, relationship building and networking among people at their own level.

“As women climb up in business, it becomes more scarce at the top,” said Marto, a Marietta resident who was born in Jordan. “We’re leading the way in a new territory sometimes.”

Marto herself is a mover and shaker in Atlanta’s music industry. Over the past two decades, she’s held several roles supporting artists’ creative and business endeavors, nurturing new talent and helping to build music infrastructure in a city where music is its greatest cultural export.

At 21, legendary music executive L.A. Reid hired her to work on his A&R team at Island Def Jam Records, where she started as an executive assistant and ended up managing the Atlanta office. After she left, she founded, built and ran Twelve Studios in West Midtown, which previously served as the Atlanta headquarters for Rick Ross’ Maybach Music Group, Atlantic Records, Epic Records and Empire Distribution’s Atlanta offices before closing in 2023. Her work with building Twelve Studios landed her recognition from the city for contributions to Atlanta’s music scene. She also joined rapper T.I.’s management team for seven years until joining UTA and signing him as her first client.

Now, she’s part of the team building United Talent Agency’s Atlanta office. UTA is the only major talent agency with a physical office in the city.

Marto has become an influential, dominating force in an industry that has historically been male-dominated. This is true across both the creative and executive sides of the business.

In a study examining 1,200 top-charting songs from 2012 to 2023, women comprised 13.4% of the songwriters, according to the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. The percentage of producers was a fraction of that — just 3%.

Another study by USC found only 13.2% of top executives at major and independent music companies were women. The numbers improve across levels of executive leadership below president and CEO titles — about 39% of roles were held by women, of which only 10% were women of color.

As Marto advanced in her career, she found she was often the only woman in the room. This meant she was the only woman representing women. It made her feel like she had to deliver, she said. In these spaces, she was not only representing herself but an entire group of women like her who want to have a voice and bring value to the table.

Up until her colleague Greer Davis was promoted at UTA this spring, Marto was the only female music agent from a major talent agency in Atlanta.

The idea for the dinner took shape as she realized that successful women who have climbed the ladder or reached a certain place in their careers seem to become isolated and alone. They crave community and camaraderie with their peers outside of events like networking mixers, where the end goal is to do business with each other.

“It’s different when you sit down and have dinner. You’re breaking bread with people,” Marto said. “What I’ve learned is that we, especially coming out of the pandemic, need more connectivity than we realize. People are really yearning for that.”

Empowering the younger generation of women is important to Marto. She didn’t have a lot of female mentors coming up in the music business. In fact, she adds, she didn’t have any.

“All of my mentors were men,” Marto said. “There weren’t a lot of women to look up to that I knew or were gracious enough to bring me close and try to guide me. A lot of my opportunities came from men. I wanted to make a difference in the lives of younger women because I feel like it’s important to see who you are in other people.”

Greer Davis, her colleague at UTA, moved to Atlanta in January from Los Angeles. Since then, their relationship has evolved into a mentor-mentee dynamic.

She said having Marto in her corner since she moved to Atlanta has been a blessing. It’s allowed her to grow her network faster than she may have without her. Marto has introduced Davis to people she needs to know and shown her the power of being a person of her word.

“Sometimes you feel like, in different industries, that it’s such a boys club. Trying to break that wall is challenging,” Davis said.

Lasting professional and personal relationships have been forged at the dinner. A guest at the dinner held at Forth called Dina “the great connector.” Davis called her “the deputy mayor.”

“I call Dina ‘the deputy mayor’ because everywhere I go, people know her,” Davis said. “I was just in L.A., and someone said, ‘I owe Dina my career.’ I’m not even in Atlanta, and this is still happening.”

Marto has done other work to uplift women in the industry. In the early days of the pandemic, she began to reassess her priorities and goals, and she realized she wanted to create more mentorship opportunities with younger women. So she and her colleague Courtney Rhodes founded an all-women-led branding agency called C&D Agency.

She wants to continue this work at UTA. Several of the guests at the dinner worked within UTA or its sister agency Klutch Sports Group, some of whom were only a few years removed from their college graduation. Marto is also involved in the agency’s Women’s Interest Group and La Femme Majeure, an organization and event series that brings together the next generation of female leaders in the music industry and nurtures professional growth.

“I know people like Dina who really care about mentorship are leading the next generation of executives or agents,” Davis said. “She’s giving us all her knowledge to hopefully pay it forward.”

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