Eunhye Jeong (정은혜) is a pianist, composer and improviser who was born on July 7, 1986, according to Discogs, MusicBrainz, German Wikipedia and Wikidata. She is a South Korean national who lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and her own biography says she travels back and forth between the United States and Korea, where she creates, performs, improvises, writes and teaches. No source gives her birthplace. She publishes as Eunhye Jeong, given name first, and Discogs files her the same way, with 정은혜 as her real name. In an interview published in October 2022 she gave her nationality as Korean and said that Korean is her mother tongue.

She told the interview site 15questions that she began improvising at the piano at four and had lessons from about six, after her mother taught her the basics. She decided to take music seriously at 19 or 20, when she was reading philosophy and aesthetics and visiting contemporary museums and galleries in Seoul, and the spark was Thelonious Monk. German Wikipedia says she trained in Seoul before going to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and her own biography says she graduated from Berklee in 2013 with a dual major in film scoring and piano performance (German Wikipedia calls it a master's degree). Her teachers there included the film composer George S. Clinton and the pianist Vadim Neselovskyi.

Berklee is also where she turned to Korean music. In 2011 she took part in an International Gugak Workshop at the National Gugak Center in Korea, and back in Boston she founded Sigimsae, the Berklee Korean Traditional Music Society. From 2015 to 2019 she spent each summer in Korea studying pansori, the sung storytelling tradition, with the pansori master Il-dong Bae. She also wrote the score for the short film Payphone (2014), which her biography says was honored at the Boston Student Film Festival, and co-wrote the music for Ancestry (2015) with the percussionist Munyungo Jackson.

Her debut album, Turtle Suite (2015), has nine pieces on Apple Music, opening with "Jindo Arirang", the Korean folk song that her biography calls the culmination of her Berklee society work. The band on her website's credits has Song Yi Jeon on voice, Chuks Okpu on bass, Roberto Giaquinto on drums, a string group (the violinists Layth Sidiq and Nayoung Baik, the violist Dan Lay and the cellist Naseem Alatrash) and two Korean traditional players, Do-yeon Kim on gayageum and Sung Yun Kim on haegeum. A review in All About Jazz later described it as melody-based originals in which Song's wordless vocals were as much a protagonist as Jeong's piano.

The change of direction came in 2017 at the Banff Centre in Canada, in a three-week jazz and creative music workshop led by Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey, whom her biography credits as mentors. In the 15questions interview she says that in Sorey's ensemble the first thing everyone did each morning was play open, and that she clicked with it immediately: she no longer had to confine herself to other people's compositions or standards. At Banff she also met the pianist Noa Fort; the two recorded two hours of improvised music for two pianos the first time they played together, and five pieces from it became 2 Begets 3 (2018). Her second album as leader, Chi-Da: Be Silent as Loud as Possible (May 2018), is a solo piano record of thirteen pieces, almost all improvised. Ian Patterson reviewed it in All About Jazz on January 3, 2019, and noted that "chi-da" means "hit" and "play". In Bandcamp Daily she describes the word as the collision at the center of her work: striking something creates a sound.

She has said that she also contacted Wadada Leo Smith to learn his musical language and compositions, visiting him once or twice a year since 2018 and playing in his ensemble once in Connecticut. Her biography adds that she was the pianist of Smith's NDA ensemble when it performed his ECM album Divine Love at the third CREATE Festival, and her Korean-language biography says his compositional language has influenced her own writing. These are her own accounts, and Discogs lists no shared recording. Her biography likewise says she has performed in duo with the cellist Okkyung Lee. In 2019 she was a panelist at the Agile Futures colloquium of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, speaking on a theory she calls Improvising to Create the Aged Now. Her TVV Quartet (Three Voices from the Valley), with the violinist Elinor Speirs, the cellist Mina Kim and the drummer Mario Fabrizio, dates from the same period.

The Colliding Beings, Chi-Da brought the Korean thread back. It is a live recording of a concert at Audioguy in Seoul on July 19, 2019, with the pianist leading a quartet of the cellist JI Park, the drummer Soo Jin Suh and Il-dong Bae singing pansori. The liner text says the four met for the first time at the soundcheck and played with almost no preset material. Bandcamp describes Suh as a member of the Near East Quartet, which identifies her as Soojin Suh. The record came out on January 15, 2020. Phil Freeman wrote about it in Bandcamp Daily on January 17, 2020, praising the power of her left hand, and her biography says it was named a best album of 2020 by the American magazine Sequenza 21 and the Korean site JazzSpace. The JazzSpace review says the center of its achievement is her conception, composition and playing, and notes that she was by then working in the United States.

On February 11, 2020 she played at The Lilypad in Cambridge, Massachusetts with the drummer Francisco Mela, the bassist Max Ridley, the alto saxophonist and bass clarinetist Allison Burik and Mina Kim on cello. That concert was recorded and, per Discogs, became End of Time / KM-53 Project Vol. 1, issued by 577 Records on October 7, 2022; a second volume, with two tracks from the same period ("Journey Through" and "KM-53"), followed on October 25, 2024. The project is named after KM-53, an Asiatic black bear that walked nearly 80 kilometers through the mountain range of South Korea and passed away in June 2023, a story she tells in the liner notes. Between the two came Abyss, a free-improvisation duo with the Korea-based bassist Minki Cho. They first played together at the release concert of her previous album, and recorded the album on August 19, 2020 at the BOOMiz studio in Seoul. Sunjae Lee recorded, mixed and mastered it on a Tascam 424 cassette machine for his label Mung Music, which released it on September 1, 2020.

The most visible step came with ESP-Disk, the New York label that introduced Albert Ayler and Sun Ra. Nolda (ESP5068), a solo piano album of nine pieces recorded on January 8, 2021 at Futura Productions in Roslindale, Massachusetts, was released on September 24, 2021. The Absolute Sound gave it a five-star notice in March 2022, saying it recalls Cecil Taylor or Matthew Shipp in some moments and Messiaen-like chords or pentatonic folksong in others, and the Free Jazz Collective had given it four stars in January 2022. The title is a Korean word for "play", which she relates to Chi-Da in the liner notes. Later, the bassist Michael Bisio, who plays in the Matthew Shipp Trio, heard Nolda and asked to work with her, according to JazzTrail. Their duo, billed as Jeong / Bisio Duo, recorded Morning Bells Whistle Bright on March 8, 2023 at Park West Studios with Joe McPhee on tenor saxophone and Jay Rosen on drums joining on some tracks. ESP-Disk released it on March 14, 2025, with liner notes by Paul r. Harding and a cover by Dawn Bisio.

Her work in Korea has continued alongside. The Goindol Project, a suite in six parts on the theme of Korea's prehistoric dolmens, uses a trio with the bassist Seung-ha Lee and the drummer Sunki Kim; it was first recorded on January 19, 2022 at Advart Music in Seoul and performed at GhettoAlive in Seoul on April 8, 2022. In Seoul she also plays with the dancer Bari Kim. Her biography reports two nights on the main stage of the Suncheonman International Garden Expo in 2023 with the drummer Simon Barker, the trumpeter Scott Tinkler and Il-dong Bae. In 2024 she organized CON-, billed as Eunhye Jeong & The Creative Orchestra, a project of workshops and a showcase concert built on conduction (Butch Morris's system of conducted improvisation), with support from the Arts Council Korea and a documentation volume published on her site. She writes as well: her Korean biography describes a monthly newsletter, Food for Thought, in Korean with English translations, and her English biography says she is writing a book on the philosophy of Korean traditional music, language and the Hangeul alphabet.

She names Thelonious Monk as the player who made her take music seriously, and says that discovering Matthew Shipp's playing showed her the same spirit. Reviewers reach for Cecil Taylor and Shipp as well, and Phil Freeman added the Soviet composer Galina Ustvolskaya for her hammering left hand. Her own teachers and mentors range from film scoring (Clinton) through jazz composition (Neselovskyi) to the creative music of Iyer and Sorey, and she says that a discovery of the AACM and the musicians in its lineage gave her a vehicle that fit her ideas.

Korean tradition is the other pole. She studies pansori breath and vocal structure rather than copying its forms, she says, and she builds pieces on principles taken from the Hangeul alphabet and from Korean philosophy: her composition TMMSS ("time mass") keeps only the consonants of the words, treating consonants as seeds and vowels as the growth from them. She describes music as growing organically from a seed, perceives sound as shape and color, and writes graphic and visual scores. The Absolute Sound hears classical, jazz and Korean influences and notes that she uses more space than most free-jazz pianists. Discogs files her records under jazz, with the styles Avant-garde Jazz and Free Improvisation, and she records for free-jazz labels (ESP-Disk, 577 Records).