Lee Luvisi (1937) studied in his native town Louisville, Kentucky, with Dwight Anderson, a pupil of Isidore Philipp. At 14, he was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia where he became a student of Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. Upon his graduation there in 1957 he was appointed to the major piano faculty. He made his Carnegie Hall recital debut in 1957, followed two years later by his first appearance with the New York Philharmonic. In 1960, he was a bronze medalist in the Queen Elisabeth Competition.

Lee Luvisi moved with his family back to Louisville in 1963 when he was invited to become Artist in Residence at the University of Louisville School of Music, a position he held until his retirement in 2001. His performance activities through the years have included a formidable array of engagements across all of the fifty states, as well as in Canada, Mexico, Australia and Europe. He has been soloist with nearly every important orchestra in North America and under such distinguished conductors as Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, William Steinberg, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Sir Neville Marriner and Robert Shaw. His brief European career in the late 60s and early 70s saw numerous highly-acclaimed appearances in London, Vienna, Berlin and other major capitals.

As a chamber pianist, Lee Luvisi has collaborated with many of the world's foremost musicians and ensembles. Included amongst these have been the Juilliard, Guarneri, Cleveland and Emerson Quartets, and eminent artists such as Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Alexander Schneider, Leonard Rose, Richard Stoltzman, Jan DeGaetani, Frederica von Stade, Benita Valente and Dawn Upshaw to name a few. For two decades, until 2003, he was an Artist Member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Lee Luvisi has participated in the Marlboro, Aspen, Casals, Mostly Mozart, Chamber Music Northwest, Chautauqua and Tanglewood summer festivals, among many others. He can be heard on the Delos, Bridge, Arabesque and Louisville Orchestra First Edition recording labels.

During the 2000/01 season he presented the complete solo piano works of Beethoven in a twelve-concert series in his native city where, a decade earlier, he had undertaken a similar marathon encompassing Mozart's complete solo keyboard compositions to celebrate that composer's bicentennial.