Dabin Ryu (류다빈) is a pianist, composer and arranger born in Seoul, South Korea, who has lived and worked in New York since 2018. She has led two albums: Wall (2021), ten originals that she composed, arranged and produced herself, and Trio! (2025, Endectomorph Music), her first piano trio record, made in a single day with the bassist Joe Martin and the drummer Johnathan Blake. Her date of birth is not published; the organizers of the 2024 Unisa International Piano Competition listed her age as 29 that February. Korean Cultural Center New York gives her name in Hangul as 류다빈.

Her Seoul schooling is part of the record. Her Unisa competition biography says she began classical piano as a small child, at age three, and played classical music for about ten years before moving toward jazz and contemporary styles. The Monterey Jazz Festival's biography adds that she won scholarships to Gimcheon Art High School and Howon University, took prizes at several Korean music competitions and formed her own band at 19. A CJ Cultural Foundation scholarship supported her graduate study from 2018 to 2020.

She left for the United States on a full scholarship to Berklee College of Music, where she double-majored in piano performance and jazz composition and received her bachelor's degree in 2018, after winning the school's Piano Department Award in 2016. At Berklee she studied with Joanne Brackeen, Ralph Peterson and Buster Williams, and her competition biography adds the drummer Kendrick Scott to that list. A master's degree in jazz studies from the Manhattan School of Music followed in 2020, the year she took the Outstanding Piano Award at the Jack Rudin Jazz Championship. She was pursuing an Artist Diploma at The Juilliard School in 2025, and the Monterey Jazz Festival's 2026 biography lists the diploma as completed. She is also an associate professor in Berklee's Piano Department.

Her first recording credit is a Boston date with Peterson's big band. Ralph Peterson's GenNext Big Band recorded I Remember Bu live at Scullers Jazz Club on November 2, 2017, with the alto saxophonist Donald Harrison as featured guest, and Ryu is one of two pianists credited on the Onyx Music release of 2018. In New York her biographies list work with Peterson, Billy Harper, Godwin Louis, David Virelles (she is a member of his Nosotros ensemble), Rodney Jones, Neal Smith, Jaleel Shaw, Kurt Elling and Carl Allen, and appearances at Smalls, Zinc Bar, Dizzy's Club and Harlem Stage.

Her Korean connections continue after the move. Several biographies say her own Dabin Ryu Quintet toured Seoul in the summer of 2019. On March 30, 2024 she led her band, with Nathan See on saxophone, Benjamin Young on bass and Willis Edmundson on drums, in "Jazz in Full Bloom," a Young Korean Artists Series concert that Korean Cultural Center New York presented with the CJ Cultural Foundation. The center also promoted her Trio! release night at Dizzy's Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center on August 28, 2025, where Walter Stinson played bass and Blake drums.

Wall came out on June 1, 2021. It runs from a full saxophone section on the opening "The Light" to unaccompanied piano on "Stillborn," and its two "Wall" pieces are written out in full, with no improvisation. The reviewer at Take Effect gave it 8 out of 10 and praised her piano playing, arranging and production. She played the music at The Jazz Gallery in New York on April 14, 2022, with Zoe Obadia and Nathan See on alto saxophone, Kevin Scollins on guitar, Benjamin Young on bass and Willis Edmundson on drums. She was a semifinalist in the 2023 Herbie Hancock Jazz Competition, took part in The Jazz Gallery's 2023 mentoring series with Blake, put out the single "Earworm" in January 2024, and won first prize in the jazz section of the 15th Unisa International Piano Competition in Pretoria, South Africa, in 2024. The jazz jury included the pianist Cyrus Chestnut and Makiko Hirabayashi.

In 2025 she received The Jazz Gallery's Residency Commission and presented new music there with a quintet on March 29. Trio! was recorded at Jaybird Studio on November 9, 2024 and released on August 15, 2025. Textura called it a master class in piano trio interplay. In 2026 she played the Tim Jackson Garden Stage at the Monterey Jazz Festival on September 27 and recorded the album Radio Casual with the guitarist David Blake, who invited her to turn his trio into a quartet.

Ryu writes and plays in the bop tradition, with a modern rhythmic feel. The Jazz Gallery describes Wall as hard-charging bop with a contemporary rhythmic gait, and one piece from it, "Suspicion," has a clipped, uneven melody that recalls Thelonious Monk's "Evidence." Textura hears a Monk-like roller-coaster line in her own "Vertigo," which opens Trio!.

Her writing runs wider than a single band format. Wall mixes a large ensemble, a vocal feature and an unaccompanied piano piece, and part of it is through-composed. Trio! pares that back: three of its pieces are her originals and the rest are pieces by Mary Lou Williams, Kenny Dorham, John Stubblefield, John Hicks, Oscar Pettiford and Vincent Youmans. Textura hears nuance and restraint on the Stubblefield piece, a blues-tinged touch on "Dorham's Epitaph" and a lyrical side on her own "Sad Song."

No interview in which she lists her influences was found, so this section stays with the records, the reviews and her teachers. In her own note on Trio! she calls Martin and Blake her heroes and mentors and says the project taught her about studio recording and playing in a trio.