Born in Berlin, Kolja Blacher was accepted for study with Dorothy Delay at the Juilliard School of Music in New York as a fifteen-year-old.

Kolja Blacher has performed with conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Alan Gilbert, Daniel Harding, Vladimir Jurowski, Dimitri Kitajenko, Diego Matheusz, Kent Nagano, Matthias Pintscher, Karl-Heinz Steffens