John Holloway is one of the pioneers of the modern “Early Music” movement in Britain. He played his first public concert in aid of Hungarian refugees in 1956. He was 8 years old. After a conventional training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and various international competitions, he worked as a freelance in London: throughout the 1970s he combined concert-mastering and managing the orchestra of Kent Opera, appearances with all the prominent chamber-orchestras in London, contemporary music and string quartet concerts, and, after encountering Sigiswald Kuijken in 1972, performances on Baroque violin.

In 1975 John Holloway founded the ensemble L'Ecole d'Orphée, which made the first complete recording on baroque instruments of Handel’s instrumental chamber music. He has performed and recorded a considerable repertoire with such distinguished colleagues as Emma Kirkby, Stanley Ritchie and Andrew Manze, Davitt Moroney and Lars Ulrik Mortensen, Marion Verbruggen and Jaap ter Linden. He won a Gramophone Award in 1991 for his recording of Biber's Mystery Sonatas.

John Holloway has been Professor of Baroque Violin
at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and
Guest Professor at the Schola Cantorum in Basel and at the Early Music Institute at IU Bloomington, Indiana. 

Since 1999 he has been Professor of Violin and String Chamber Music at the Hochschule für Musik in Dresden, Germany. 
In September 2004 he was Regents' Lecturer at UC Berkeley.