Heun Choi is a cellist who was born and raised in Korea, came to the United States in 2001 to study jazz, and has worked as a jazz cellist in New York since then. Her Hangul name has not been found in any source. She leads her own group Jayu, plays on one track of her husband Jeff Fairbanks' big-band album Mulberry Street (2011), and has no album released under her own name. This is a thin profile: it rests on a few local newspaper pieces from 2008 and later, a concert listing, her own promotional biography, a trombonist's press and credits pages, and Discogs.

Her billing varies by source. The Korean Cultural Center New York listing, the Queens Buzz review and her own promotional page use Heun Choi; the QNS preview and the personnel list of Mulberry Street print Heun Choi Fairbanks, adding her married name; Christian Howes's website and Discogs use Choi Fairbanks, and Discogs lists the name variation Choi Heunjung Fairbanks. This profile uses Heun Choi, the form that leads her own group's billing.

According to the QNS preview, she began piano in South Korea at five and switched to cello at eight. Her own biography, a self-written page undated but written around 2008, says she won two international competitions run by the Korean National Music Association as a teenager, attended Seoul Arts High School, earned a bachelor's degree at Hanyang University on a full scholarship and began master's study at Ewha Women's University. It lists orchestra work in Seoul with the Seoul Premier Orchestra and the Seoul Civic Orchestra, and later in the United States with the Southwest Florida Symphony, the Arpeggione String Quartet in Tampa, the New York Jazz Symphony Orchestra and, as principal cellist in 2002, the Henry Mancini Institute Chamber Orchestra.

She arrived in 2001 as an exchange student at the University of South Florida, where, by her biography, she took a dual master's degree in jazz and classical performance, held the Roe 'Cello Scholarship, worked as a teaching assistant, directed an orchestra program at a middle school and ran a private teaching studio. QNS says she met the trombonist and composer Jeff Fairbanks while both were studying at a South Florida college. After they married they moved to New York, first to Flushing and then to Woodside, Queens, where the couple had a son, Teo, born in 2008. A later Fairbanks biography says the two live in Queens with their two children.

In 2008 she received an individual Artist Support grant from the Queens Council on the Arts, together with the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and its Greater New York Arts Development Fund. The Korean Cultural Center listing calls it an individual Artist Award. The grant helped pay for a public concert in Queens, the Jayu concert described below. The group's name is a Korean word meaning freedom, and the idea, as QNS reported it, was to bring jazz to the Korean community in Queens. Its sound mixes jazz with Asian folk material, and QNS lists funk, blues, Western classical music and a hint of Malaysian classical music among its ingredients. The lineup was Heun Choi on cello, Francesca Jiyoun Han on piano, Mark Chung on violin and Joe Hertenstein on drums, with the percussionist Yosun Yoo as a guest. Fairbanks wrote a commissioned piece for the premiere and arranged Pat Metheny's "Minuano" for the group.

The free concert took place on Saturday, October 25, 2008, at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Jamaica, Queens, and the Queens Buzz writer put the audience at about twenty people on a rainy night. The second half included "Bat-no-Rae", "Mopti", Fairbanks' "Hoping For Hope" and "Minuano"; the first piece after the interval was by Han and blended traditional Korean music with a modern jazz tempo. The Korean Cultural Center's events page carries the same concert text under October 25, 2009, with the same members and the same "newborn son" line; because October 25, 2008 was a Saturday and the two local reports describe a Saturday night, the 2008 date is the one used here. The listing says she planned to record Jayu and tour the United States and Korea. No Jayu recording has been found.

In New York she also played in the jazz string community around the violinist Christian Howes. A post on Howes's website, dated January 15, 2010, shows her as cellist, billed Choi Fairbanks, in a fall 2009 concert at Jalopy in Brooklyn of Joel Harrison's arrangements of Paul Motian's music for two guitars and string quartet, with Harrison and Liberty Ellman on guitars, Sam Bardfeld on violin and Mat Maneri on viola. Howes wrote that she came from South Korea with almost no English roughly ten years earlier to learn jazz cello and had become one of New York's leading creative string players. Her own biography adds that she helps run the Howes Creative String Workshop each year and has taken part in the IAJE New Music String Reading Ensemble.

Her one jazz recording credit came next. Jeff Fairbanks' Project Hansori recorded the big-band tracks of Mulberry Street on December 7 and 8, 2009, and a quartet version of the old Korean folk song "Han Oh Baek Nyeon / 500 Years" on March 26, 2010 with Fairbanks on trombone, RaMi Seo on gayageum, Yosun Yoo on percussion and Heun Choi Fairbanks on cello. The album came out on Brooklyn Jazz Underground Records in 2011. Tom Hull's Jazz Consumer Guide noted her as the guest cellist, and the reviewer Richard B. Kamins wrote that the cello adds a somber tone to the quartet piece. She appeared as a special guest on cello when Project Hansori played the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in Long Island City on June 2, 2011. Fairbanks' own concert list records duo and trio performances with her in South Korea and the Philippines in August 2011, and a May 2013 appearance by the two as guests at Queens College with the New York Korean-American Chorale. A June 2011 Queens newspaper feature on Fairbanks says she teaches at the Korean church in Long Island City where he plays in the orchestra, and that she at times performs with his orchestra.

Separately, Discogs credits cello to an artist called Choi Fairbanks on a run of New York dance-music and remix projects between 2005 and 2023, among them the producer Joe Claussell's 2007 CD Un.Chained Rhythums, a 2007 12-inch of remixes of Chico Hamilton's "Mysterious Maiden" and several Sacred Rhythm Music releases. Whether that artist page and this cellist are one person rests on the name, on the Discogs name variation Choi Heunjung Fairbanks, and on Howes's use of Choi Fairbanks for the Korean-born New York jazz cellist; no release note says so outright, and the credits are listed in the full discography with that caveat.

Her own biography says she moves between jazz, classical, gospel and contemporary styles and describes herself as a composer and improviser as well as a cellist. The Korean Cultural Center listing presents the cello as an unusual voice in jazz, and Jayu's stated aim was to join jazz with Asian folk music, with material that was original, arranged by the members or commissioned. On Mulberry Street the reviewer Kamins heard the cello setting a grave tone against Fairbanks' trombone in a Korean folk song.

Scope: her classical training is extensive and Discogs lists her in dance-music sessions, but the jazz evidence is her own: she studied jazz in Florida, leads a jazz and Asian-folk group, plays with New York's jazz string players and appears on a jazz big-band album. The Korean basis is clear: born and raised in Korea, trained in Seoul, and active in Queens' Korean community.