DoYeon Kim (김도연) is a gayageum player, singer and composer who was born in Seoul, trained in Korean traditional music in South Korea until 2014, and has lived in the United States since then, now in Brooklyn. The gayageum is the Korean silk-string zither, and she plays it in free jazz and improvised music in New York's improvised-music scene. Her releases print her name as DoYeon Kim, with a capital Y, and that is the form used here; some listings write Doyeon Kim or Do Yeon Kim. Her birth date is not given in her official biographies. A 2023 UK Jazz News review of her Roulette concert reported that a stage projection gave it as June 24, 1991, in Seoul; her management's biography calls her Seoul-born and Brooklyn-based, and a 2026 Chicago Tribune interview gave her age as 34 in April of that year. German Wikipedia hedges between 1991 and 1992. No source found states her citizenship.

Her Korean start is well documented. Grammy.com says she began on piano at four and switched to the gayageum at 11; in the Chicago Tribune interview she remembers hearing a traditional Korean performance with her father at about ten and being drawn at once to the sound. A winter language program in Victoria, Canada, in middle school was her first time living outside Korea, and she says it set her on the idea of becoming a gayageum player who lives abroad. She attended the National Traditional Music High School, then Seoul National University, where she was a protegee of the gayageum master Yi Ji-young and graduated with top honors in 2014. She won gold at the Dong-A Ilbo Traditional Music Competition in 2009 and at the On-Nala Korean Music Competition in 2011, and gave her first recital in 2011. German Wikipedia adds that her Seoul teachers noticed her interest lay less in the traditional repertoire than in contemporary music.

In 2014 she moved to Boston to study at the New England Conservatory. She told The Tonearm in May 2026 that it was the only school she found with a contemporary improvisation major, that other programs wanted her to be a scholar, and that she cried through much of her first year. The conservatory's alumni page lists her as a Master of Music of 2016 and a Graduate Diploma holder of 2018. She was the first student admitted there on a Korean traditional instrument, studied with Hankus Netsky, Anthony Coleman and the guitarist Joe Morris, and led the JaYu Quartet, one of the conservatory's honors ensembles for 2015-2016. Her biographies also give her a graduate degree from the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, again as the first student admitted on a Korean traditional instrument; they do not say in which year. In 2016 she was selected for the graduate division of the CJ Music Scholarship, which the Korean Cultural Center New York dates as 2016 to 2018, and in 2018 she received the Emerging Artist Award of the St. Botolph Club Foundation in Boston.

Her first record was GaPi (CJ E&M, 2017), a duo with the pianist Chase Morrin, with guests on three of its nine tracks: the vocalists Burcu Gulec and YangYim Park, and the drummer Eli Cohen with Yaniv Yacoby on doumbek. A 2018 Korean Culture Boston festival biography says its release concert in Korea sold out, and the album was nominated for best crossover album at the 15th Korean Music Awards in 2018, where the nominees were printed as "DoYeon Kim and Chase Morrin." That biography says her Kim Do Yeon Band was invited to play in Berlin and Budapest.

The free-improvisation records followed quickly. With Morris she made the duo Macrocosm, recorded on September 18, 2018 at Dimension Sound Studios in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and released on December 5, 2018 on his Glacial Erratic label; Catalytic Sound's description praises its pointillistic playing, its chordal passages and the moments when it is hard to tell which player is which. Other Galaxies, from a concert at Firehouse 12 in New Haven on July 3, 2018 with Morris, the Spanish pianist Agustí Fernández and the bassist Brad Barrett, runs to two pieces of 33 and 31 minutes and came out in 2022 on Fundacja Słuchaj!. She is also on Via Augusta by the Agustí Fernández Ensemble, a live recording from the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona on July 11, 2019, issued in 2020 on Sirulita, the label Fernández promotes.

On August 31, 2019 she recorded with the alto saxophonist Jim Snidero for Project-K (Savant, 2020), an album whose titles include "Han," "DMZ," "Jeju" and "Seoulful," with Dave Douglas on trumpet, the pianist Orrin Evans, Linda Oh on bass and the drummer Rudy Royston; Discogs credits her on gayageum on seven of its eight tracks. In 2020, Grammy.com says, her collaborations with Tyshawn Sorey at the New England Conservatory drew notice, and on May 28, 2021 it named her one of seven musicians pushing ancient Asian instruments into the future. In 2021 she also became music director of the Gyeonggi Sinawi Orchestra, a traditional-music orchestra in Korea, and in 2023 its improvisation conductor. She joined the New England Conservatory faculty in 2022 and also teaches at The New School.

She has been a guest on other leaders' records. She plays gayageum, and sings on "Pre-Nasal Tension," on bassist Nick Dunston's Spider Season (Out Of Your Head, recorded on October 31, 2021 and released on July 15, 2022), which also has the trombonist Kalia Vandever. She is a featured guest on four of the ten "Cycles" of the Elias Stemeseder and Christian Lillinger album Umbra (Intakt, recorded in New York on September 28 and 29, 2022 and released on May 17, 2023, with Peter Evans, Russell Hall and Brandon Seabrook) and on one track of their vinyl follow-up Antumbra (Plaist, 2024). She plays on saxophonist David Leon's Bird's Eye (Pyroclastic, 2024) with the drummer Lesley Mok, and on the title piece of bassist Brandon Lopez's Nada Sagrada (Relative Pitch, released on February 21, 2025), a 39-minute piece recorded live at Roulette Intermedium during the 2023 Vision Festival with the harpist Zeena Parkins, the violist Mat Maneri, the electronics player Cecilia Lopez and the drummers Gerald Cleaver and Tom Rainey. She also has a credit on "Gnomes," the opening track of Laura Totenhagen's vinyl album Raw (2024).

Her own projects grew in the same years. As the 2023 Van Lier Fellow at Roulette in Brooklyn, she presented a concert on June 29, 2023 that UK Jazz News called her New York debut as a bandleader, playing gayageums, singing and dancing with David Leon, Yuma Uesaka, Brandon Lopez, Tomas Fujiwara and Satoshi Takeishi. On March 29, 2024 Korean Cultural Center New York and the CJ Cultural Foundation presented her band, with Takeishi, the pianist Phillip Golub and the bassist Walter Stinson, in the Young Korean Artists Series concert "Jazz in Full Bloom"; the pianist Dabin Ryu led her own band in the same series the next night. On May 15, 2024 Roulette presented her Sun Shower, a new work with the gayageum in the lead and two drummers, Tyshawn Sorey and Yoon Ho-Se. She recorded the duo album Syzygy, Vol. 1 with Lopez at Sear Sound in New York on February 19, 2024; 577 Records issued it in a limited first run in January 2025, and the New York City Jazz Record heard two players so close in sensibility that the title's "opposites" hardly applied.

In 2025 she gave a solo gayageum performance at the Brooklyn Public Library's Central Library, listed for March 8, appeared at Joe's Pub with Kris Davis and the drummer Tom Rainey on July 8, performed an improvised work for the 12-string gayageum, "Silk Echoes Beneath the Light," at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago on August 10, and was named a Next Jazz Legacy awardee by Berklee and New Music USA, with Davis listed as her bandleader and the bassist Mark Dresser as her creative mentor. Discogs lists her on gayageum on a nonet album by the saxophonist Anna Webber, It's Easier to Imagine the End of the World ... (Intakt CD 459, 2026), with Mary Halvorson, Ingrid Laubrock, David Virelles, Chris Tordini and Ches Smith. In 2026 she played the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville.

Wellspring (Tao Forms, May 1, 2026) is her debut as a bandleader. She plays the 25-string and 12-string gayageum and sings, with Sorey on drums, Maneri on viola and Henry Fraser on bass, in seven pieces, four composed by her and three by the group according to the Free Jazz Blog; Discogs credits her with composing and producing the record. The Vinyl District gave it an A, and the Free Jazz Blog's review called it distinctive and powerful. The New York Times featured her on April 28, 2026, describing her, in the words her conservatory passed on, as an in-demand collaborator for some of the biggest innovators in improvised music. Her management's biography says that after the pandemic her focus shifted from self-expression to how music can contribute to society.

Her ties to Korea continue. Besides the Gyeonggi Sinawi Orchestra and her Korean Cultural Center New York concerts, the saxophonist Sunjae Lee, who runs the Seoul improvised-music label Mung Music, named a Doyeon Kim working in the United States as the most impressive example of a traditional Korean instrumentalist who also does free improvisation, in a PAN M 360 interview about the label.

Kim is first an improviser. Grammy.com reports that she told its writer a note on the gayageum is alive, starting in one hand and ending in the other, so that she can shift it and cook it, that Korean music has no concept of harmony and that she therefore works with microtones, and that she hears the instrument's trembling vibrato as a sound of Korean grief shaped by war and occupation. The same article connects her approach to the harmony of Thelonious Monk. She told The Tonearm that she picked up some extended techniques by imitating other instruments such as trumpet and guitar, and that she plays with the left hand, bends strings and changes how much of the string she covers to alter the tension. Her management's biography says her improvising draws on pansori, the Korean sung-storytelling tradition, and that her singing connects to post-punk and the Downtown New York scene; The Tonearm ties her use of voice to playing in a band led by the saxophonist Tony Malaby.

Whether her work is jazz is a matter of emphasis, and she is most often classified as free improvisation. Discogs files most of her releases under free improvisation, free jazz or avant-garde jazz, and the labels that issue her records (Intakt, Relative Pitch, Pyroclastic, Out Of Your Head, Savant) are jazz and improvised-music labels. Berklee's Global Jazz Institute and the Next Jazz Legacy award place her inside the jazz institutions, while Korean Music Awards listed her first album as crossover and her own bio lists Korean music, jazz and improvisation side by side. On Wellspring her gayageum and voice sit against the drums, viola and bass of Sorey, Maneri and Fraser, music The Vinyl District calls intense but aimed at positivity and healing.

No interview in which she names a full list of influences was found, so this section stays with what she has said about her instrument and the records.