Joshua Bell was born in Bloomington, Indiana, the son of a professor at Indiana University. The young Joshua exhibited an intense drive to play an instrument at a very young age, which prompted his parents to buy him a small violin before his fifth birthday. He started taking lessons about that time, and it was soon very clear that Joshua Bell was a unique talent with the violin. Bell's parents were stuck in a rather delightful dilemma throughout his youth, because while they wanted to encourage and develops Joshua's violin abilities to their highest potential, they also wanted him to acquire a well-rounded and traditional boyhood by keeping him in a regular school and pushing him to play video games and organized sports. Mr. and Mrs. Bell sought out the instruction of the famous Russian-born violinist Josef Gingold, who was working at Indiana University.

In his early teens Joshua Bell began performing with major orchestras and symphonies and as a solo violinist. He later attended Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music, where he earned an Artist Diploma. In 1985, at the age of 18, Joshua Bell performed for the first time at Carnegie Hall with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. With several successful performances in association with some of the most renowned and respected orchestras in the world (including the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony), Bell's fame as a concert violinist began to reach superstar proportions.

In 1998 Joshua Bell was introduced to a wider, more mainstream audience with his work on the soundtrack to the The Red Violin. The film score, which was directed under John Corigliano, won an Academy Award, and furthered Joshua Bell's already masterful reputation. Joshua Bell plays a violin known as The Gibson Stradivarius, one of the greatest and most famous stringed instruments in the world, one that was forged by the great Antonio Stradivai in 1713, and cost the artist nearly $4 million dollars.