Hee Kyung Na (나희경) is a South Korean singer and songwriter who built her career on bossa nova, first by taking it to Rio de Janeiro in 2010 and then by recording and touring between Rio and Seoul. She was born on March 24, 1987; no source names her birthplace. Her name is written several ways: Hee Kyung Na on Discogs, Wikidata and the covers of her first three albums, Na Hee-kyung in Korean-press romanization, Heekyung Na on her latest releases and in Brazil, and Heena as a stage name, which is also the title of her debut album. Korean services bill her as 나희경, and the form used here is the one on her Discogs entry and album covers. She has made five albums between 2011 and 2024, with the Brazilian guitarist Roberto Menescal, the singer-songwriter Ivan Lins, the guitarist Celso Fonseca and the singer Leila Pinheiro among her guests, and she is generally described in Korean coverage as a pioneer of Korean bossa nova. Whether that makes her a jazz singer is a fair question, and the Style & Influences section sets out both sides.

Her parents opposed a music career for about ten years, she told TenAsia in 2012, so she agreed to academic goals and took a degree in psychology, concentrating on how people perceive music. A later interview names Ajou University and says she made music with MIDI software from elementary school, played guitar in a fusion band at her school and had Santana posters on her wall as a teenager. She told TenAsia she wrote songs in elementary school and sold belongings in middle school to buy equipment, and told Sidae in 2014 that she wrote her first bossa nova piece in 1998.

She debuted on September 16, 2010 with the mini-album 찾아가기 (Chajagagi), released on Mirrorball Music under the name 보싸다방 (Bossa Dabang), which Cyworld named its album of the week. She went to Rio de Janeiro that autumn, on her own, with the CD and a guitar. Seoul Shinmun dates the trip to October 2010 and Sidae to December, so "late 2010" is as exact as the sources allow. At Vinicius Bar, a bossa nova club, she sang Jobim's "Desafinado" and word of her spread among local players. Roberto Menescal's son Marcio passed her music to his father, who telephoned her, then arranged songs and played guitar on her first album. She taught herself Portuguese in about a month, Seoul Shinmun reported, and local music-industry figures reportedly said her accent sounded about 65 percent native.

That first album, HEENA (Sony Music, October 11, 2011), has fifteen tracks recorded in Brazil, most of them standards of the repertoire: "How Insensitive," "Desafinado," "Corcovado," "Chega de Saudade," "Girl from Ipanema," "Dindi," "Água de Beber" and a Korean-language version of "Wave," plus "Um Amor," which she sings with Menescal, and a prelude-samba piece with the musician Lee Sang-soon (이상순). She told TenAsia that she scrapped her first recording sessions and re-recorded after extending her stay, and that the second Brazilian trip ended with her return to Seoul in April 2012. Naver Music named HEENA its album of the week in November 2011, and Seoul Shinmun's coverage carried the headline about exporting bossa nova back to its homeland. MBC's Live Friday Wide showed her singing at a bossa nova club in Rio in February 2012. In April 2012 she released the five-song EP 나를 머물게 하는, which reworks Korean pop songs in bossa nova style around the title track "춘천 가는 기차," a song she first heard in middle school; she said the music was finished in Brazil and mastered in Korea. A two-track release, 나에게 가까이, followed in October 2012.

Up Close To Me (Sony Music, November 7, 2013), her second album, has twelve tracks, among them "So Pra Sonhar" with Menescal and Guilherme Gê, and "A Lista" with the Brazilian singer-songwriter Oswaldo Montenegro. In 2013 she was also executive producer and director of To The Sea (Mirrorball Music) by the Brazilian drummer and producer Cesar Machado, a Brazil and Korea project on which Malo, Ithamara Koorax, Maria Creuza and Lee Han-chul each lead a track and she sings "Oneida." In 2014 she wrote the lyrics for "I," which she sings with the pianist Yiruma on Yiruma & Friends: Atmosfera, an album on which the pianist Cho Yoon-seung also plays. In a November 2014 interview, Sidae described her music as a blend of the Korean feeling of "han" and Brazilian "saudade." Her influences, it reported, included João Gilberto, Lenine, Brazilian popular music (MPB) and Celso Fonseca, and she named Malo, a close friend, as a Korean musician she admired. She also said she had moved to Brazil to learn bossa nova.

Flowing (Sony Music, September 17, 2015) is her third album and the one Discogs lists. Its ten tracks include "Estate," a Fernando Brant and Milton Nascimento song ("Encontros e Despedidas"), Jobim's "Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar," "What a Difference a Day Made," Stevie Wonder's "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" and three of her own ("Dear," "Floating" and "Arirang With Brazilian Sound"). Ivan Lins is credited as a featured artist and writer on "Acaso" and "Começar de Novo." She is credited as vocalist, executive producer, music director and arranger, and the drummer Cesar Machado as music director and arranger. The players include Adriano Giffoni and Didier Fernan on bass, Humberto Mirabelli on guitar, Nelson Freitas on keyboards, Reginaldo Vargas on percussion, David Ganc on flute, Diogo Gomes on flugelhorn and João Carlos Coutinho on piano and accordion. It was recorded at Estúdio Umuarama in Brazil and at two studios in Korea, and mixed by Kwak Eun Jung at Kwak Studio.

Between 2016 and 2017 she released a run of singles, the two 다시, 보싸다방 volumes with Menescal ("Heart," "O Barquinho," "Reminiscence" and "Guardada em Mim") and, according to Korean Wikipedia, four with Celso Fonseca between December 2016 and April 2017, among them "Slow Motion Bossa Nova" and "Samba e Tudo." Amora, her fourth album, came out on October 30, 2018 on Page Turner, with "Bom Dia" and "Voce" as advance singles. It was made in Brazil and has ten tracks, among them "Voce" with Menescal, "Somos Todos Iguais Nesta Noite" with Ivan Lins, "Feliz" with Leila Pinheiro, and two pieces featuring the cellist and arranger Jaques Morelenbaum. In 2018 she also gave a concert at Lotte Concert Hall in Seoul, and in 2020 a concert series billed with Menescal. According to Korean Wikipedia she has toured Brazil repeatedly since 2010, in Rio, São Paulo, Sorocaba, Brasília and Ourinhos.

During the pandemic, she has said, she taught at a university, noticed how often students and freelance artists confided their anxieties, and went on to graduate school in counseling psychology. In 2024 she released three singles with Menescal, "Vagamente," "Rio" and "Nós e o Mar," and on September 11 her fifth album, BOSSA, billed to her and Roberto Menescal, with the percussionist Marcos Suzano joining them on two of its seven tracks. Korean reports say she completed a four-state tour of Brazil that year that included a solo concert at Blue Note Rio, described as the first by a Korean artist, and the club performance of "Um Amor" with Menescal was posted to her YouTube channel on September 3, 2024. She played the concert New Year, New Wave with Lee Hae-wan and Lee Ki-hyun around the start of 2026, was a guest on KBS Classic FM's world-music program in a bossa nova special in July 2026, and gave a concert billed as "Na Hee-kyung's Bossa Nova" with the guitarist Park Yoon-woo, the bassist Kim Seong-su and the drummer Lee Do-heon at Theater Yangpyeong in August.

Bossa nova is the center of what she does, and she describes it as music that is gentle on the surface and strong underneath, with harmony and feeling beneath a calm exterior. She sings in a close, whispery voice that she says replaced an earlier, more powerful vibrato, and she has said that bossa nova made her tremble. Her Brazilian repertoire comes from the songbooks of Jobim, Menescal and Lins, and her own songs and her Korean-pop reworkings sit beside it.

The case for placing her in jazz is real but partial. Discogs describes her as a "Korean Jazz, Bossanova vocalist" and files Flowing under Jazz and Latin with Bossa Nova as its style. Wikidata gives her genre as jazz, and Korean Wikipedia lists jazz and bossa nova together. Apple Music files HEENA, Up Close To Me, Flowing and BOSSA under jazz. She sings jazz-repertoire material alongside the bossa classics ("How Insensitive," "Misty," "What a Difference a Day Made"), and Sidae's 2014 profile reminds readers that bossa nova arose in 1958 from samba and modern jazz. Korean Wikipedia lists her at the Jarasum International Jazz Festival in 2011, the Seoul Jazz Festival in 2012 and 2016, the Seoul Forest Jazz Festival in 2017 and 2018 and the Jeju Island Jazz Festival in 2019, and she names the jazz singer Malo as a friend and admired colleague.

The case against is as strong. Her Korean Wikipedia entry calls her a bossa nova singer-songwriter. In TenAsia's 2012 interview, jazz comes up only in passing, as the more jazz-influenced European take on bossa nova that she said she was starting to like. Her influences, collaborators and repertoire are Brazilian popular music, with Menescal, Lins, Fonseca, Pinheiro and Montenegro more at home in MPB and bossa nova than in jazz, and a large share of her catalogue is Korean songs set to a bossa nova groove, released by Sony Music Korea and other pop-oriented labels; Apple Music files several of her singles under K-Pop. No jazz award or jazz-category nomination turned up. Korean Wikipedia reports two Korean Music Awards nominations, in the crossover category in 2012 and 2014, and lists no win. She is profiled here as a vocalist at the point where bossa nova and jazz meet, and the discography leaves the choice to the listener.