Hyungjin Choi is a South Korean-born pianist, composer and arranger who has lived in New York since 2008. Her name in Hangul does not appear in the English-language sources. Her All About Jazz musician page gives her birth date as November 16, 1983 and her birthplace only as South Korea; no city is stated, and her citizenship is not stated anywhere. She began on classical piano at an early age, graduated from the Seoul Institute of the Arts in 2006, and moved to New York in 2008 to study at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. She finished a Bachelor of Fine Arts in performing arts there in 2010, with the school's Jazz Scholarship and the Noah Osnos Scholarship, according to her website and her All About Jazz biography.

Her biographies name her New School teachers and mentors as Sam Yahel, Reggie Workman, Charles Tolliver, Jimmy Owens, Charlie Persip, Kevin Hays and Billy Harper, and say she took part in several ensembles there, among them one built around Harper. These are statements from her own biographies; no recording credit with any of them has turned up. She later earned a master's degree in collaborative piano at the Manhattan School of Music, where her website says she studied with John Forconi and now works as a staff pianist.

Her first documented band was the Hyungjin Choi Quartet. All About Jazz's Patrick Hanna reviewed its set at Puppets Jazz Bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on December 7, 2010, in a piece published on March 5, 2011. He heard a young group with a distinctive sound: the saxophonist Yacine Boulares, the bassist Elad Muskatel and the drummer Takehiro Shimizu, with Choi leading through mostly original pieces and a few standards. The set included her ballad "Jordan River", her arrangement of "You Don't Know What Love Is", her trio piece "Leaving Home", Thelonious Monk's "Monk's Dream" and her gospel-flavored "Toy Soldier". Hanna closed by saying the performance bodes well for a debut recording. Her website also carries four tracks recorded in New York in 2010, "You Don't Know What Love Is", "Leaving Home", "Up and Down, My Life" and "My One and Only Love", with Boulares, Shimizu and the bassist Pablo Menares.

The debut came three years later. Tales of a Dreamer was recorded on October 2, 2013 at Acoustic Recording in Brooklyn and released on March 24, 2014; her website says it came out through PND Records, while All About Jazz lists it as self-produced. Her band was the trumpeter Takuya Kuroda, the alto saxophonist Uri Gurvich, Boulares, Menares and the drummer and percussionist Alex Wyatt, and she wrote the nine pieces and arranged them. She describes dreaming as a decision to keep faith in something not yet seen, and says "Jordan River" is a metaphor for crossing into a promised land. The album has nine tracks, one of them, "Tiny Room to Hide", a 42-second piano interlude, and she sings on "Autumn Song".

Two jazz outlets reviewed it. Nick DeRiso of Something Else! wrote on April 30, 2014 that it moves across a wide range of moods and textures and stays satisfying throughout, singled out the hopeful and slightly fragile vocal on "Autumn Song", and compared "Toy Soldier" to hard-swinging 1950s Blue Note records. The Italian critic Angelo Leonardi, writing for All About Jazz on April 2, 2015, called it a delightful debut and praised her tuneful, refined themes and her sense of form. He thought the bop-leaning trio piece "Dexterity" recalled Sonny Clark, and picked "Autumn Song" as the track with the best chance of becoming a hit.

After the album her listed work moved toward classical chamber music, church music and arranging. Her All About Jazz biography, written around the time of the album, has her as music director at Onnuri In2 Church in Manhattan and on the piano faculty of the Music School of Westchester and Riverdale Music Studio. Her website now says she is assistant music director and organist at Calvary-St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan, runs a private studio, and organized a concert series called Jazzical Sessions in the Bronx in 2017. She performs with her husband, the cellist Benjamin Larsen, as the Larsen-Choi Duo, which has premiered works by Robert Sirota, Marjorie Merryman and Ke-chia Chen. At Muzzy Ridge Concerts in Searsmont, Maine, on August 24 and 25, 2024 the duo played Sirota's Cello Sonata No. 2, which he wrote for them in 2018, Brahms's Cello Sonata No. 2 and a jazz improvisation by Choi. Her website's itinerary also lists a cello and piano recital with Larsen at St. John's Park Slope in Brooklyn on January 11, 2026, with works by Mendelssohn, Bach and Martinu.

As an arranger she is credited on two albums by the pianist Lara Downes. On Some of These Days (Flipside Music, 2020) she arranged "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" for solo piano, as both Discogs and Apple Music credit it. Her website also lists Downes's Holes in the Sky (Sony Masterworks, 2019), and a review of that album credits two arrangements, "Willow Weep for Me" and "Just for a Thrill", to "Hyungin Choi". Her website lists further arranging work for a Korean album and for a stage production by Manami Aoki that premiered in Japan in 2023; neither is documented anywhere else.

Her writing, as reviewers describe it, favors singable themes and clear form, with the solos growing out of the melodies. Leonardi heard radiant, dancing moods across the record, with "Dexterity" as the one trio piece in a Sonny Clark vein. DeRiso placed "Toy Soldier" in the lineage of 1950s Blue Note, and Hanna heard "Toy Soldier" in 2010 as a gospel-tinged tune with saxophone and piano trading phrases. Her early sets mixed her own compositions with standards, among them "You Don't Know What Love Is" and "Monk's Dream". Faith and perseverance run through the album's titles and her own account of it, and she has worked as a church musician for most of her time in New York. Her biographies do not list musical influences.

Her scope needs stating plainly. On the jazz side, she holds a New School jazz degree, led a quartet at a Brooklyn jazz club, made a jazz album with three horn players, and was reviewed by two jazz outlets, and Apple Music files the album under Contemporary Jazz. On the other side, that album is the only jazz recording of hers found, and her listed activity from 2024 to 2026 is mostly classical chamber music, church work and collaborative piano.