[6][7] A musically precocious child, Hahn began playing the violin one month before her fourth birthday in the Suzuki Program of Baltimore's Peabody Institute.

[9] In 1990, at age ten, she was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she studied for seven years with Jascha Brodsky, who had been a student of Eugène Ysaÿe.

She learned the études of Kreutzer, Ševčík, Gaviniès and Rode, Paganini's Caprices, 28 violin concertos, and chamber works and assorted showpieces.

[10] At 16 she completed the Curtis Institute's university requirements, but she remained for an additional three years to pursue elective courses until her graduation in May 1999 with a Bachelor of Music degree.

[15] She made her international debut in 1994 performing the Bernstein Serenade in Hungary with Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra.

Her German debut came in 1995 with a performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with Lorin Maazel and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

In 1996, she debuted at Carnegie Hall in New York City as a soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, playing Saint-Saens's third violin concerto.

[17] In a 1999 interview with Strings Magazine, she cited people influential to her development as a musician and a student, including David Zinman, the conductor of the Baltimore Symphony and Hahn's mentor since she was ten, and Lorin Maazel, with whose Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra she performed in Europe.

She has released 16 albums on the Deutsche Grammophon and Sony labels, three DVDs, an Oscar-nominated movie soundtrack, an award-winning recording for children, and various compilations.

[20] Her albums include pairings of Beethoven with Bernstein, Schoenberg with Sibelius, Brahms with Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky with Jennifer Higdon.

[37] Since 2016, she has piloted free concerts for parents with infants, a knitting circle, a community dance workshop, a yoga class, and art students.

[42] In 2010 a concerto written for Hahn by Jennifer Higdon and recorded with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Hahn began her film recording career as the soloist for James Newton Howard's score for M. Night Shyamalan's The Village in 2004.

[51] Her recording of Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto was used extensively in The Deep Blue Sea, starring Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston.

Keeping the intonation pure in double stops, bringing out the various voices where the phrasing requires it, crossing the strings so that there are not inadvertent accents, presenting the structure in such a way that it's clear to the listener without being pedantic – one can't fake things in Bach, and if one gets all of them to work, the music sings in the most wonderful way.In a segment on NPR titled "Musicians in Their Own Words", she spoke about the surreal experience of playing the Bach Chaconne (from the Partita for Violin No.

In a Strings Magazine interview, she said that the idea for her "Postcards from the Road" feature originated during an outreach visit to a third-grade class in upstate New York.

The class was doing a geography project in which the students asked everyone they knew who was traveling to send postcards from the cities they were visiting to learn more about the world.