Dubravka Tomšič Srebotnjak was born on 7 February 1940 in Dubrovnik, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. She is Slovenian. She had private lessons from an early age, attended the music high school in Ljubljana, and studied at the Slovene Academy of Music with Zora Zarnik.

On the advice of Claudio Arrau she moved to the United States at the age of twelve, and graduated from the Juilliard School in New York in 1957, where she worked with Katherine Bacon and Alexander Uninsky. Arthur Rubinstein heard her recital at Town Hall in New York and invited her to study with him privately in the late 1950s; she became one of his protégées.

She took third prize at the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition in 1961, and received the Prešeren Fund Award in 1962 and the Prešeren Award in 1975. Since 1967 she has taught piano at the Slovene Academy of Music in Ljubljana, and since 1995 she has been an honorary member of the Slovenian Philharmonic. She is married to the Slovenian composer Alojz Srebotnjak; their son, Martin Srebotnjak, is a film director.

Her career has been built on sustained concert activity rather than on a single signature project. She is credited with more than 3,500 performances, given across Europe, Asia, North America, Mexico, Australia and Africa, and with more than twenty records and some seventy CD releases.

The line of her training connects her to two very different traditions: the Slovene school she came from, and the American conservatory and the private tutelage of Arthur Rubinstein that followed. She has carried that back into Slovenian musical life, teaching at the Slovene Academy of Music in Ljubljana since 1967, where her students have included Majda Martinc and Sonja Pahor.

She has also served on the juries of major international competitions, among them the Van Cliburn, the Leeds and the Clara Haskil, which places her within the mechanism by which the next generation of soloists is selected as well as taught.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubravka_Tom%C5%A1i%C4%8D_Srebotnjak