Sharon Isbin is a multiple Grammy Award winning American classical guitarist and the founding director of the guitar department at the Juilliard School.

Sharon Isbin was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the daughter of Katherine Isbin and Herbert S. Isbin, a nuclear scientist and professor at the University of Minnesota and author of Introductory Nuclear Reactor Theory (1963). She began her guitar studies at age nine with Aldo Minella in Varese, Italy, where her father had been hired as a consultant. She later studied with Jeffrey Van, Sophocles Papas, Andrés Segovia, Oscar Ghiglia, Alirio Díaz, and for ten years with the noted keyboard artist and Bach scholar Rosalyn Tureck. Isbin collaborated with Tureck in preparing and recording landmark first performance editions of the Bach lute suites for guitar. She began practicing Transcendental Meditation at age 17. She received a B.A. cum laude from Yale University and a Master of Music from the Yale School of Music.