Boomi (부미), whose given name is Choi Boomi (최부미), is a pianist, composer and artistic director from Incheon, South Korea. She studied jazz piano and composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston and leads Music Odyssey, an Incheon company that grew out of her jazz group, Boomi's Jazz Odyssey. Her career is documented mainly through concerts, music-theatre pieces and Korean press coverage rather than records: only three digital singles, released between 2019 and 2022, carry her name. Her birth date, July 11, 1983, comes from Korean Wikipedia and Wikidata, and no second source gives it; Korean newspapers independently call her a native of Incheon. She is alive and active.

Her own website lists three stretches of study. From 2003 to 2006 she was in the practical music department of the Seoul Institute of the Arts. From 2008 to 2011 she was at Berklee in Boston, in jazz composition and performance, and Korean Wikipedia says she graduated there with a bachelor's degree in jazz composition and piano. A 2015 news agency report on one of her concerts says she was taught by the Latin jazz player Victor Mendoza, a Berklee professor. The website also lists a master of fine arts in art and technology at the Seoul Institute of the Arts for 2024 to 2026, with a 2025 thesis on her opera Hearing Time in Silence.

Music Odyssey took shape in 2014. The news agency Newsis described Boomi's Jazz Odyssey in 2015 as a jazz group formed in 2014 around her, with Kim Seong-jun, Han Ung-won and Kim Yun-cheol, that had moved from the blues toward a Korean-flavored jazz, arranging Korean popular songs and trying meetings with gugak, Korean traditional music, as well as running concerts built around a theme. Newsis announced a concert with Mendoza at DS Hall in Seocho, Seoul, for November 6, 2015 and called it a meeting of teacher and student. The group appeared at the fifth Incheon Love Music Concert, broadcast live, on October 14, 2016, and a Dong-A Ilbo notice from October 2018 lists a Boomi's Jazz Odyssey performance on October 24 at 7:30 pm.

Her own website names a run of concert programs from those years: Tango! (2017), BROADWAY! (2018), JOSEON (2019), the Viator Ensemble (2019) and Traditional Style: On Romanticism (2020), the last braiding jazz with classical music. JOSEON sends a modern band and Korean traditional performers back to the Joseon dynasty through court music, folk songs, pansori storytelling and the begging songs of the marketplace; it was restaged on July 2, 2022 at the Bupyeong Arts Center, with the drummer Kim Hong-gi, a professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts, the pansori singer Baek Hyeon-ho, the bassist Kim Bong-gwan, the guitarist Kim Hyeon-dong, the daegeum player Park Song-i and the percussionist Kim Ji-hye, with Boomi as music director. In 2022 Music Odyssey was a resident company of the Bupyeong Arts Center and, according to the newspaper Kyeongin Ilbo, of the Incheon Foundation for Culture and Arts for 2022 and 2023.

Stage works made up the next stretch. The jazz opera Jazz Club the Queen of the Night (2022), her jazz arrangement of Mozart's The Magic Flute, played at the Bupyeong Arts Center with 26 cast members and 11 instrumentalists; the music director was Park Kyung-tae and the director Jo Eun-bi. Her own website and Korean Wikipedia also list a line of jazz music dramas set in Jemulpo, the old name for Incheon's harbor district: Jemulpo, The Jazz Yegrina (2021), which Edaily described as a jazz musical about love in Incheon's opening-port years, then Yegrina Yeonhyang Story (2022) and Yegrina in the Jemulpo Club 1926 (2022). On November 4, 2023 the company presented Eclipsed Journeys from Odyssey at the Namdong Sorae Art Hall in Incheon, a jazz chamber ensemble and contemporary dance program on the voyage of Odysseus in seven tracks, from "The Beginning of Ante Meridiem" to "Beneath the Starlit Reflection." Boomi led it as pianist and general director, with the saxophonist Hyunpill Shin, the electronic artist DEY KIM, the flutist Lee Gyu-jae and the choreographer Jung Mi-young. Her 2021 single, "Decrescent Nostalgia (The Beginning of Ante Meridiem)," carries the same subtitle as that opening track.

On January 27, 2024 she led Japera, a group whose name joins jazz and opera, at the Incheon club Bottom Line: Boomi on piano, Kim Hyeon-dong on guitar, Kim Bong-gwan on bass, Kim Jong-hyeon on drums, Kim Ju-eun on violin and the singers Seo Jeong-min and Yun Hae-jin. On August 31, 2024 she played on the waterfront stage of the tenth Songdo Tribowl Jazz Festival, on a bill with the Shin Dae-chul Blues Band. On November 9 and 10, 2024 the musical Jemulpo Blues, set in 1920s Incheon, played at the Songdo Tribowl; she wrote the music and the script and was artistic director, in a project that Kyeongin Ilbo said took seven years. It fuses 1920s swing, ballad and Latin jazz with Incheon arirang, Jindo arirang, pansori and samulnori rhythms.

Her most recent large work, Hearing Time in Silence (2025), moves further from jazz. It is a four-hour durational media opera with no stage or seating, played through an eight-channel sound system. It was presented at the Korea-China Cultural Center in Incheon on November 15 and 16, 2025 and at Gallery M30 of the Mullae Arts Factory in Seoul on November 22 and 23, 2025, and was announced for La MaMa in New York on January 30 and 31, 2026, in association with CultureHub. The Seoul critic Hyun-min Song, writing in the monthly GAEKSUK, described its sound as Baroque in structure, jazz-improvisational in its responsiveness and driven by sinawi, a Korean improvisatory ensemble form with roots in shaman ritual music.

Not much more is on record. No interview about her influences beyond the press quotations used here was found, no Discogs or MusicBrainz entry exists for her, and the albums that Korean Wikipedia lists under her name are, on the streaming services, single tracks.

Boomi's idea of jazz is a meeting place. Her own words, quoted by OBS, say she tries to look at art with a wide view and to cross the borders with other genres, and the same report describes her as building her work on jazz while collaborating with classical, opera, gugak, pop, dance and fine art. The Kyeongin Ilbo report on Jemulpo Blues quotes her saying that Incheon and jazz share a mix of cultures and a feeling for sorrow, affection and exuberance, and that she wanted to express the city's inclusiveness through the free spirit of jazz. The CultureHub review of Hearing Time in Silence sums up her path as a pursuit of what it calls genre deviation, favoring hybrid encounters over fidelity to a style, and names three earlier works in that line: Traditional Style: On Romanticism (2020), jazz with classical music, Queen of the Night (2022), jazz with opera, and Paphos 2.0 (2023), a collision of artificial intelligence and poetic theatre.

On whether she is primarily a jazz artist, the evidence points both ways. Korean newspapers from 2022 to 2024 introduce her as a jazz pianist, her group began as a jazz band, her degree is in jazz composition, and Apple Music files two of her three singles under Jazz. Against that, Wikidata lists her genre as classical music, her recorded output is three singles of which one is a piano arrangement of a Schumann song, her most recent work is a media opera, and her own website now presents her as a sound, installation and performance artist whose work is organized around sound and spatial experience. This profile treats her as a jazz-trained pianist-composer whose work has moved steadily toward hybrid and media forms.