Jinjoo Yoo is a jazz pianist, composer and arranger from Seoul, South Korea, who has lived and worked in New York since her graduate studies there. She has led one release so far, the six-track I'm Curious (Gut String Records, 2018), a trio session with the bassist Neal Miner and the drummer Jimmy Wormworth, and she plays often as a sideperson, most recently on the trumpeter Dwayne Clemons's live album Center of Gravity: Live at Smalls (Cellar Music, 2024). Her own release prints her name on the cover as "Jin Joo Yoo", while Discogs, All About Jazz, Apple Music and her performance listings spell it Jinjoo Yoo, the form used here.

Her All About Jazz musician page gives her birth date as April 15, 1989 and says she hails from Seoul. A 2021 event page for a New York series at chashama says she was born in Seoul, and a 2024 Birdland listing calls South Korea her native country. According to that biography she enjoyed singing and playing instruments from her youth, and jazz captured her attention soon after she started university in South Korea, where she was studying sociology and economics. She fell for the music of Mary Lou Williams, Wynton Kelly, Teddy Wilson, Bud Powell, Sonny Clark, Art Tatum, Jimmy Rowles, Billie Holiday and Carmen McRae, and says she studied harmony and theory on her own while listening to their records. After graduating she decided to pursue jazz in New York. In 2015 she was accepted at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, and she earned a master's degree in jazz performance there in 2017. The same year she was a finalist in the Baku Jazz Competition in Azerbaijan.

I'm Curious followed in February 2018. Discogs lists it as an EP (GSR 030) and her biography calls it her debut album; it holds five pieces by Yoo, "Blullaby", "Dizzy Blossom", "I'm Curious", "And I Call It Home" and "To Barry With Love", plus an alternate take of "Blullaby". Gut String Records is the New York label founded by Miner, who plays bass on the record. Her biography says she held a release show at Rockwood Music Hall with Miner and Wormworth and then toured Greece and Italy to launch the record. Michael Steinman of the blog Jazz Lives wrote that she can be tender and ruminative and can also make vivid, joyous dances, and that her single notes seem just right. The British critic Lance Liddle added the album to his Album of the Month choices at Bebop Spoken Here, hearing a strong bop influence in her solos and compositions that are almost singable. New York Music Daily is quoted in her press material calling her an important, individualistic new voice in jazz piano.

In October 2018 she recorded with the guitarist Kihong Jang for his debut, They Brought a New Kind of Music to Me (Gut String Records, GSR 043), with Miner and Wormworth again on bass and drums. She composed two of its six tracks, "Genealogy" and "Goldfish, Goldfish!", and All About Jazz's David A. Orthmann, reviewing it in December 2018, wrote that her lines are trim and deceptively persistent. Her press material also lists a trio concert with Jang and the drummer Dustin Kiselbach at ZP87 in Athens.

In May 2019 she toured England with the Chris Hodgkins International Quartet, led by the trumpeter Chris Hodgkins with the guitarist Wayne Wilkinson and, as guest, the bassist Alison Rayner, on funding from Arts Council England. The tour page calls her a South Korean pianist from New York and gives Wigan Jazz Club on May 26, 2019 among the dates; the music was standards plus four originals written for the tour. A Birdland Theater date on March 15, 2020 was listed for a drumless trio with Jang and the bassist Jamale Davis, with a program of her recent compositions and arrangements dedicated to Mary Lou Williams, Nat King Cole, Clarence Profit, Barry Harris, Tadd Dameron and Thelonious Monk. In June 2021 she was one of five artists listed for a series at chashama on West 42nd Street.

Her most recent recording is with Clemons, recorded on September 7, 2023 at Smalls Jazz Club and released on October 18, 2024: a sextet with the altoist Amanda Sedgwick, the tenor Aaron Johnson, the bassist Paul Gill and the drummer Taro Okamoto, produced by Clemons and by Spike Wilner, the pianist who owns Smalls. Pierre Giroux of All About Jazz wrote that she jumps into the fray with a subtle sense of swing, and Jack Bowers, also at All About Jazz, called her one of three stellar soloists on the date. On November 28, 2024 she led a trio with the bassist Daniel Duke and the drummer Keith Balla at Birdland Theater, presenting her latest originals and her arrangements of jazz classics. Her biographies list New York rooms such as National Sawdust, Rockwood Music Hall, Shapeshifter Lab, LeFrak Concert Hall, Swing 46, Nublu, Caffe Vivaldi, Club Bonafide and Tomi Jazz, and countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece, Spain, Poland, Hungary and South Korea.

Her own biography says she wants her music to describe the world, beautiful or ugly, and the way she feels while observing it, and that her original tunes carry stories and emotions of curiosity, joyfulness, tragedy, gratitude, melancholy and pain. She plays jazz standards, the American songbook and originals, and her biography says they are played with swinging intuition.

The musicians who worked with her describe the same restraint reviewers mention. Wormworth says she does not show off and tells a big story with fewer notes than most young players, and hears Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and John Lewis in her playing. Miner calls her approach fresh, honest and personal and says she swings and tells a story. Liddle placed her in the bop tradition, and Steinman described her playing as spare but never sparse. Her debut includes "To Barry With Love", and her March 2020 Birdland program was listed as dedicated in part to Barry Harris; Liddle's review says she studied with him, a point her own biography does not mention.