A specialist of the Classic and Romantic repertoires, for more than thirty years she has appeared regularly with professional orchestras around the world, often performing the music of Chopin, and also contemporary Polish composers including Lutosławski and Panufnik.

In 1969 she was awarded 1st Prize in the CBC National Radio Competition for Young Performers in Canada and travelled occasionally to New York City for private studies with Sasha Gorodnitzki.

In 1974, while enrolled in law school in Montreal, Fialkowska participated in the inaugural Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv.

"[citation needed] In 1986, to commemorate the centennial of the death of Franz Liszt, Fialkowska was invited to perform his complete Transcendental Études in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, in London for the BBC, and in Canada for the CBC.

Also in 1992, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced a television documentary of her life and career, entitled The World of Janina Fialkowska, which was aired across Canada and was awarded a special jury prize at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

In January 2002, on the eve of a European concert tour, Fialkowska's career was interrupted by the discovery of an aggressive cancerous tumour in her upper left arm.

[5] Following the removal of the malignant mass in May 2002, she subsequently underwent an innovative surgical procedure designed to reconstruct the arm that had been rendered almost useless by the excision of the tumour.

[21][22] Janina Fialkowska was the founder and first artistic director of Piano Six, a not-for-profit educational outreach program dedicated to supporting classical music in small communities throughout Canada.

In 1993, Fialkowska convinced five well-known Canadian classical pianists to join with her in a tour of outlying communities that rarely host internationally known musicians.