Yueun Kim

Violinist YuEun Kim has performed internationally as a chamber musician. An online video recording of Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp minor, Op. posth. (arranged for violin and piano by Nathan Milstein), has been viewed more than 16 million times. Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1988. She has also been known as Yu Eun Kim and YuEun Gemma Kim. Kim took up the piano at age five and the violin at seven, and she also enjoyed singing Korean and American popular songs with her father. As a young woman, she played the organ at 6 a.m. services at the family church. Kim attended Seoul National University, earning bachelor's and master's degrees. Winning a full scholarship to the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, she moved to Los Angeles for studies there with Midori Goto (generally known as Midori). While enrolled, she won USC's Solo Bach Competition and the Strings Concerto Competition. She maintained connections to East Asia, notching a semifinalist showing at the China International Violin Competition and another at the Michael Hill International Violin Competition in New Zealand. While in school at USC, Kim began to perform frequently in the Los Angeles area. She gave recitals at the Nixon Presidential Library, Sundays at LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), and Pasadena City College, and she appeared as a soloist with the USC Symphony Orchestra and Symphony Irvine. Beyond Los Angeles, she gave a recital at New York's Alice Tully Hall and has performed at Yellow Barn in Putney, Vermont. An enthusiastic chamber player, Kim is a co-founder of the Zaffre String Quartet and, with guitarist Ines Thomé, of the duo Yu and I. Kim has performed in Europe and Asia, including with the Kumho Chamber Music Society in South Korea, in addition to the U.S., and she has served as artist-in-residence with the Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra. In 2023, Kim appeared on the Sono Luminus album Sonic Alchemy with pianist Mina Gajić and cellist Coleman Itzkoff.
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