DoYeon Kim is a Korean artist, composer, improviser, and gayageum player based in New York. Her work explores music as a practice of listening, connection, and transformation, drawing from Korean musical traditions, composition, improvisation, voice, and the physical possibilities of the gayageum to create a musical language of her own.

Rather than approaching tradition as a fixed boundary, Kim understands it as a living source of knowledge, memory, and possibility. Her music moves freely between composition and improvisation, intimacy and intensity, delicacy and physical force. Through the gayageum and voice, she explores questions of memory, grief, identity, relationship, and our shared humanity. For Kim, the instrument is not simply a carrier of cultural heritage, but an extension of her own voice and a means of discovering sounds and relationships that have yet to exist.

Her debut album as a bandleader, Wellspring (TAO Forms, 2026), features Tyshawn Sorey, Mat Maneri, and Henry Fraser and has received international critical acclaim. The Wire described Kim as “the bandleader and virtuoso gayageum player” who “connects consciousness with the cosmos,” while DownBeat called her “an avant-gardist in the truest sense” and “a pioneer bringing her instrument into entirely new sonic worlds.” The New York Times has featured Kim as an in-demand collaborator among leading innovators in improvised music.

Kim has collaborated with artists including Kris Davis, Tyshawn Sorey, Joe Morris, Anna Webber, Ingrid Laubrock, Cooper Moore and others. Her work has been presented at the Vision Festival, Big Ears, the Lincoln Center, and venues throughout the United States and internationally. She has also worked as a music director, improvisation conductor, and educator.

A recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship and a Next Jazz Legacy awardee, Kim holds degrees from Seoul National University, New England Conservatory, and Berklee College of Music. She is currently based in New York, where she continues to develop music that asks not what a tradition should remain, but what it can become.