Yella Venkateswara Rao is an Indian classical musician and percussionist, considered by many as one of the leading exponents of Mridangam, an ancient Indian percussion instrument. He is featured in the Guinness Book of World Records for playing mridangam continuously for 36 hours.

Venkateswara Rao was born in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in a family of musicians to Rama Murthy and Mahalaxmi.He started his music training at the age of 7 in vocals, violin and veena, apart from mridangam but, later, concentrated more on mridangam and trained under his uncle, Yella Somanna, a known mridangam guru,[6] who later adopted the young Rao. On the academic front, he graduated in Arts (BA) and secured his master's degree in Public Administration (MA) and started his career by joining Potti Sreeramulu Telugu University, Hyderabad, as a faculty member. He worked at the university for 27 years in various capacities such as the professor and head of the department of Music and, later, as the Dean of the School of Fine Arts during which time, he is reported to have started several new courses at the university. Concurrently, he was also associated with the All India Radio, from 1963 to 1989, in capacities as an instrumentalist, staff artist, composer and mridangam artist.

He is a recipient of the DLitt (honoris causa) from the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University and several other honours such as Ugadi Puraskar Award, Visista Puraskar Award, Kala Ratna Award, Bharathamuni Award and Viswa Saahiti Award, besides others.