Nana Yashvili is a Georgian violinist and teacher, born on 14 October 1949 in Tbilisi. Her father, Luarsab Yashvili, was a professor at the Tbilisi Conservatory and an Honored Artist of the Georgian SSR. He gave her her first violin lessons.
At the age of fourteen, Yashvili made her orchestral debut with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. She graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1970 and completed postgraduate study there in the class of Leonid Kogan.
Yashvili won a prize at the Second Transcaucasian Competition for Performing Musicians in Tbilisi in 1965. At the Long–Thibaud International Competition in Paris in 1967, she received the Grand Prix and a special prize for the best performance of Maurice Ravel's Tzigane. She was also a laureate of the Montreal International Competition in 1972.
From 1971 to 1973, she performed with the State Trio of the Georgian SSR. She has appeared with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Moscow and Leningrad Philharmonic orchestras, and the Saxon State Orchestra in Dresden, among others. Her conducting collaborators included Kirill Kondrashin, Kurt Masur, Yehudi Menuhin, Valery Gergiev, Arnold Katz, Pavel Kogan, and Jansug Kakhidze.
Yashvili has frequently taken part in festivals in Vienna, Bregenz, and Copenhagen. Her interpretation of Arnold Schoenberg's Violin Concerto at the Vienna State Opera was noted as an extraordinary event. Her repertoire includes works by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Dmitri Shostakovich, George Gershwin, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
She began teaching at the Moscow Conservatory in 1970 as Leonid Kogan's assistant, remaining there until 1973. From 1992 to 2015, she taught at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany, where she became a professor in 1992. She was named Honored Artist of the Georgian SSR in 1976 and People's Artist of the Georgian SSR in 1988.