Su Yeon Kim

After several strong competition showings, pianist Su Yeon Kim was signed to the Steinway & Sons label. She is also active as a collaborative pianist and educator. Kim was born in Seoul in 1994 and took up the piano at age five. She studied at the Korean National University of Arts' Korean Institute for the Gifted in Arts youth program with Choong-Mo Kang, Chong-Pil Lim, and Eunok Kim from 2007 to 2011. At 19, she moved to Salzburg, Austria, where she continued her studies with Pavel Gililov and also studied with Paul Gulda; she has continued to work with both those teachers and names them as important mentors. She earned a degree from the Mozarteum University in Salzburg in 2013. Soon, she began to make an impact in competition events, winning the International Johann Nepomuk Hummel Piano Competition in Slovakia in 2014. She followed that up with semifinalist showings at the 17th Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2015 and at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 2016, and she reached the quarterfinal round in the Cliburn Competition in Texas in 2017. In 2018, Kim made her recording debut, backing clarinetist Kellan Toohey on the MSR Classics album Scenes from Home: Music for Clarinet and Piano by Colorado Composers. She earned a master's degree in piano accompaniment and chamber music from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and a doctorate in collaborative piano from the University of Texas at Austin, studying with Kihoon Yang, Jean Barr, and Anne Epperson. Kim is on the faculty at the University of Colorado, teaching collaborative piano. In 2020, she won the second prize at the Mozart International Competition Salzburg, and the following year, she took the top prize at the Concours musical international de Montréal. Kim has given recitals at such major venues as the Herkulessaal in Munich, the Grand Hall of the Liszt Music Academy in Budapest, the Kennedy Center in Washington, and the Philharmonie in Paris. She has appeared at the Allegro Vivo Festival in Austria, the Allegretto Žilina Festival in Slovakia, and the St. Gellert Festival Szeged in Hungary. Kim has maintained her ties to South Korea, appearing on the Korean Broadcasting System's KBS Classic FM radio network and serving as artist-in-residence at the Kumho Art Hall in Seoul in 2023. That year she released her solo debut, Mozart: Recital, on the Steinway & Sons label.
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