Hey Rim Jeon (전혜림) is a pianist, composer, arranger and educator born in Seoul, South Korea, who has lived and worked in the Boston and New York areas since she came to the United States in 1997 to study at Berklee College of Music. She teaches in Berklee's Piano Department, where the college describes her as its first Korean faculty member, and she has led five albums, from Hey Rim Jeon & Friends (2003) to Groovitude (2022), the latest with the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington. Her date of birth is not published.

Her own biography says she took her first piano lessons at three and gave her first public performance at nine, growing up on classical music; other biographies say she started at four. At 17 she heard the Oscar Peterson Trio's We Get Requests, and the record turned her toward jazz and improvisation. The trio's pianist, Oscar Peterson, is the jazz musician her biography names first. A Berklee graduate who visited Korea encouraged her to study jazz in the United States, and she enrolled at Berklee in September 1997, at 18 by her account.

At Berklee she won the piano department's Piano Chair award for jazz performance and graduated in 2001. The college's page for her names Joanne Brackeen as a teacher, and her own biography adds Laszlo Gardony and Ray Santisi. She began teaching while still a student, in 1999. She then took a master's degree in contemporary improvisation at the New England Conservatory, finishing in 2004, where she studied with Ran Blake, George Garzone and Michael Cain. A 2012 Korean-language notice says she has led her own group, Hey Rim Jeon & Friends, around the United States since 1998.

Berklee's faculty page dates her work in the Piano Department from 2010; other biographies give earlier years for her first appointment. Berklee promoted her early to professor in 2023, gave her its Exemplary Faculty Mentorship Award in 2021 and a City Music Legacy Award at the 2015 Berklee Urban Service Awards. She has taught a course on Keith Jarrett's solo piano improvisations since spring 2017, and in 2017 Berklee Press published Berklee Jazz Standards for Solo Piano, with arrangements by four piano faculty members, herself among them.

Her recording career began in Boston. Hey Rim Jeon & Friends (Take Note Music, 2003) is a trio album she made while at Berklee, the earliest of her five leader albums, and her biography lists Alone, a solo piano album recorded in Japan, and a 2007 tour there. Also in 2007 she appeared on Negative Proof, an album with the Vietnamese singer Doan Trang that, according to her biography, won a Golden Album award in Vietnam. Mona Lisa Puzzle (jazzjeon, listed as 2009) brought in Dave Liebman on saxophone, James Genus on bass, Carrington on drums and Richie Barshay on percussion. Jazziz put its title track on a subscriber disc in November 2008, she held a release party at the Iridium in New York on March 18, 2009, and the album won Best Jazz Album at the 2009 New England Urban Music Awards. JazzTimes' Bill Milkowski called it an "intense, intelligent statement." In 2011 the title track appeared on the Korean Jazz disc of a promotional compilation, Into the Light - Music of Korea III, issued by the Korea Arts Management Service.

Introducing Hey Rim Jeon followed on February 14, 2012, her first release on N-Coded Music, with the same four guests. It holds six of her originals, Chick Corea's "Spain," Debussy's "Clair de Lune," "Softly as in a Morning Sunrise" and the Korean folk song "Arirang." The Discogs credits place its recording and mixing at Zampol Productions, Tobu Hall and PBS Studios, and press materials say it was recorded in New York, Japan and Boston. She celebrated it at Birdland in New York at the end of March 2012 with Barshay on drums and Luques Curtis on bass. The Feast of Music reviewer found the set alternately distracting and mesmerizing, and said it ended with an inspired reading of "Mona Lisa Puzzle."

Her ties to Korean festivals and television run through those years. Press materials say she played the main stage of the inaugural Jarasum International Jazz Festival, held on a Gapyeong island in October 2004, on a bill with Dennis Chambers, Chris Minh Doky and Hiram Bullock, and Berklee lists her at the first and sixth editions. She calls a 2009 Jarasum set with Liebman, Carrington and the bassist John Lockwood her most memorable gig. She has also appeared on NBC's Weekend Today in New York and on Korean national television, and she has played Lincoln Center, the International Association for Jazz Education conference in Toronto, Birdland, the Iridium, the Beantown Jazz Festival and clubs in Japan and Turkey. The saxophonist Benny Golson called her a "brilliant pianist," and she has performed with him at Wellesley College.

Groovitude came out in October 2022 on Bassline Live Entertainment, distributed through Orchard and Sony, ten years after Introducing. She has said she recorded it while her father was fighting cancer, wanting music that could soothe him, and she dedicated it to him; he did not live to hear it. Carrington plays drums with Lockwood on bass on the first six of its nine tracks, and Yoron Israel plays drums with Greg Holt on bass on the next two. The program mixes five well-known songs, "Nature Boy," "Summertime," "What a Wonderful World," "Fly Me to the Moon" and "Michelle," with her own "Daughter's Dance," "Taste of Your Tears" (written with J. Curtis Warner), the Korean song "Spring in Hometown" and "100 Years of Promise," a popular Korean song by Jongwhan Kim that her father used to sing to her mother. Her biography says the album reached No. 14 on the JazzWeek national radio chart, and Korean Cultural Center New York says it stayed in the Top 20 for several weeks. She played its release shows at Scullers Jazz Club in Boston on February 24, 2023 and at Birdland in New York on March 7, 2023. On the 2018 album Rats Live on No Evil Star by Darrell Katz and the JCA Orchestra she is one of two pianists credited.

Jeon's own materials list Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, David Sanborn, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane as influences, alongside Peterson, and her publicity calls her approach "percussive." The 2012 Feast of Music review heard something looser: a trio that kept shifting styles, with "Arirang" opening as an unadorned folk melody and then passing through pop and R&B rhythms, and "Softly as in a Morning Sunrise" turning through vamps, fast swing and samba.

Her classical training shows in the repertoire. Introducing includes a Debussy piece, and the same reviewer heard "Prague" open with a rubato introduction before the rhythm section joined. Her 2003 trio album includes Dizzy Gillespie's "A Night in Tunisia," McCoy Tyner's "The Passion Dance," Horace Silver's "Peace" and Hancock's "Dolphin Dance," her own "Scent of Calla Lily" and "Taste of Your Tears," a piece credited to her and C. Warner that she recorded again on Groovitude. Korean song is part of her book too: "Arirang" on Introducing, a "Korean Folk Song" on Mona Lisa Puzzle, and two Korean titles on Groovitude.

Her teaching and her playing meet in the Jarrett course and the Berklee Press arrangements, and on Groovitude the same piano trio setting carries pieces from the American songbook, pop and Korean tradition.