Lera Auerbach was born in 1973 in Chelyabinsk, Russia, east of the Ural Mountains not far from Siberia. She became a prodigy whose first opera, written at the age of 12, was widely performed in the locale. As she began to win acclaim as a pianist, the 17-year-old Auerbach found herself in New York on an international tour and refused to leave the city, defecting to the west for good. Despite a year in Germany, she has remained there ever since.

Auerbach studied at the Juilliard School in New York under Milton Babbitt and Robert Beaser. She spent a year as a student at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in Hanover and also studied comparative literature at Columbia. She made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2002, at the piano for a performance of her own Suite for Violin, Piano and String Orchestra with Kremerata Baltica under its founder Gidon Kremer.