Marion Coles began her professional career as a member of the inimitable ballroom team, Taylor and Edwards. In the early thirties, she freelanced as a chorus line dancer before touring with Silas Green from New Orleans, a comedy and musical show that traveled throughout the South. During the mid-thirties, Ms. Coles was asked to join Ristina Banks's chorus line, one of the most famous chorus lines in the black theatre circuit. The group's popularity led to a position in the Number One stock chorus line at the Apollo Theater. During the thirties and forties, she appeared with numerous bands, including those of Jimmy Lunceford, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Count Basie.

From 1980 to 1986, Ms. Coles was a member of Jane Goldberg's Changing Times Tap Company, which received rave reviews in the United States and Europe. Since 1986, she has performed with and serves as Artistic Director of the Silver Belles, a group of former chorus line dancers who worked at the Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club when Harlem was the mainstay of New York night life.

Ms. Coles has been a featured artist in Jazz Talk, sponsored by Jazz At Lincoln Center; Shades of Harlem, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; Hank Smith's The Story of Tap, at Dixon Place; Vaudeville 2000, at La Mama; and educational presentations at Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies, the Museum of Natural History, Barnard College, and Columbia University's Jazz Study Group, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. Her company was featured most recently at the St. Louis Tap Festival (1999).

Ms. Coles has taught master classes and workshops at New York University, Queens College, Kingsboro Community College, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and Tulane University's Jazz Dance Project 2000, where she was also a featured speaker. In May 1995, her choreography was showcased in the Queens College Spring Dance Concert. Ms. Coles received the Living Treasure in American Dance Award from Oklahoma City University (2001), as well as awards from the New York Committee to Celebrate National Tap Dance Day (1992) and International Women in Jazz, Inc. (1994).