The Juilliard School /ˌdʒuːliˈɑrd/ located in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, United States, is a performing arts conservatory which was established during 1905. It is identified informally as simply "Juilliard," and currently trains about 800 undergraduate and graduate students in dance, drama, and music.

During 1905 the Institute of Musical Art was initiated on the premise that the United States did not have a premier music school and too many students were going to Europe to study music. At its formation, the Institute was located in Manhattan at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street. During its first year, the institute enrolled 500 students. It relocated during 1910 to Claremont Avenue in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. During 1920, the Juilliard Foundation was created, named after textile merchant Augustus D. Juilliard, who bequeathed a substantial amount of money for the advancement of music in the United States. During 1924 the foundation purchased the Vanderbilt family guesthouse at 49 East 52nd Street to start the Juilliard Graduate School. During 1926 it merged partially with the Institute of Musical Art with a common president, the Columbia University professor John Erskine. The schools had separate deans and identities. The conductor and music-educator Frank Damrosch continued as the Institute's dean, and the Australian pianist and composer Ernest Hutcheson was appointed dean of the Graduate School. During 1937, Hutcheson succeeded Erskine as president of the two institutions, a job he had until 1945. As of 1946, the combined schools were named The Juilliard School of Music. The president of the school at that time was William Schuman, the first winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. During 1951, the school added a dance division, directed by Martha Hill.

Itzhak Perlman (Hebrew: יצחק פרלמן‎; born August 31, 1945) is an Israeli-born violinist, conductor, and instructor of master classes. He is regarded as one of the preeminent violinists of the 20th and early-21st centuries.

Perlman was born in Tel Aviv, British Mandate for Palestine. His parents, Chaim and Shoshana Perlman, were natives of Poland and had independently immigrated to Palestine in the mid-1930s before they met and got married. Perlman first became interested in the violin after hearing a classical music performance on the radio. At the age of three, he was denied entrance to the Shulamit Conservatory for being too small to hold a violin. He instead taught himself how to play the instrument using a toy fiddle until he was old enough to study with Rivka Goldgart at the Shulamit Conservatory and at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv, where he gave his first recital at age 10, before moving to the United States to study at the Juilliard School with the violin pedagogue, Ivan Galamian, and his assistant Dorothy Delay.