Maria Kim (마리아킴) is a Seoul-born jazz singer and pianist who sings and plays at the same time, and who has built a career between Korea and the United States since her first album in 2015. Her birth name is Kim Hee-jin (김희진), and she was born on December 16, 1986. Her fifth album, With Strings: Dream of You, won Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 19th Korean Music Awards in 2022. In 2024 she became the first Korean jazz musician signed to the American label La Reserve Records, and her ninth full-length album, Something's Gotta Give, was released on October 23, 2026.

Her Discogs biography says she took up the piano at the age of three and was singing and playing professionally across South Korea by about fifteen, and the Korean Music Awards likewise describe her as having debuted in her mid-teens. Korean Wikipedia records a short stay in the postmodern music department at Kyung Hee University, which she left before finishing. She then studied in Boston, earning a bachelor's degree in professional music from the Berklee College of Music in 2008 and a master's degree in jazz performance from the New England Conservatory in 2012, according to the curriculum vitae on her own website. An artist biography carried by the retailer HighResAudio says she won first place in vocals and a scholarship at the Berklee World Scholarship Tour held in South Korea, and names Ken Schaphorst, Ran Blake and Dominique Eade among her teachers at the Conservatory. A Yes24 album description adds that she teaches as an adjunct at Kwangwoon University and other Korean schools and has completed doctoral coursework at Sangmyung University.

Back in Korea she was named a Rising Star by Jazz People magazine in 2013 in both the vocal and the piano category, which her biographies describe as a first. In 2016 the broadcaster EBS presented her on its programme Gonggam as a new face of Korean jazz. Her debut album, Those Sentimental Things (Mirrorball Jazz World and Weplayjazz, 2015), has nine tracks recorded at Studio Nine in Seoul with the bassist Daeho Kim, the drummer 김민찬, the guitarist Jinwoo Ok and the saxophonist Jeeseok Kim, with Kim on piano and vocals. In 2017 she made I'm Old Fashioned, a duo album of ten standards with the pianist Cho Yoon-seung, who appears on the record as Yoonseung Cho and plays all the piano while she sings. Jazz People placed that album and her next one, I Want To Be Happy (2018), among its ten best jazz albums of their years. I Want To Be Happy, issued by Maria Kim Jazz Company and Sony Music Entertainment Korea, is billed to her and the vocalist Sung Huh and holds eleven standards from "Cheek to Cheek" to "Moon River".

Fotografia (2019) turned to Brazil. Its fourteen tracks include "Samba de Uma Nota So", "Desafinado", "Chega de Saudade" and "Garota de Ipanema", with her trio of Daeho Kim, the drummer Kunyoung Kim and Jinwoo Ok on guitar, Jeeseok Kim on saxophone and flute, and four backing vocalists on several tracks. Her Discogs biography says it reached the top of a Korean streaming chart, and Jazz People chose it among the best Korean jazz of 2019. Two years later came the record that brought her wider notice. With Strings: Dream of You, released on November 5, 2021, sets ten standards, among them "Dancing in the Dark", "Embraceable You" and "What's New", for a string ensemble of four violins, two violas and two cellos conducted by Seungmook Lee, with a rhythm section of 박진교 on bass, Kunyoung Kim on drums and Joon Smith on guitar. The arrangements are credited to Kijoon Sung, Sungho Han, 박진교, Daeho Kim and Kim herself. The album won the Korean Music Awards' jazz vocal prize in 2022, was listed among the Jazz Audio Disc Award selections of the Japanese magazine Jazz Critique, and was named among Jazz People's best Korean jazz of 2021. A vinyl edition followed in 2022.

Two for the Road is a live album, issued digitally in October 2022 under the billing Stellive Vol.16 and on vinyl and CD in 2023. It was nominated for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 20th Korean Music Awards in 2023, where Kim Yu-jin's A Piece and the Whole won, and her own biography says the Hankook Ilbo included it among the year's albums chosen by eleven pop critics. In January 2023 Melon's Track Zero series named her its artist of the month, and that year she received the Jazz Artist Award at the 29th Korea Entertainment Arts Awards. In June 2023 she sang "Blue Smile" on What a Wonderful World, the tribute album to the first-generation vocalist Kim Jun.

The signing with La Reserve Records in 2024 opened an American chapter. Misty Blue came out on June 7, 2024 and was described by her agency as her seventh full-length album, a set of ten songs inspired by 1960s hard bop, with the trumpeter and vocalist Benny Benack III as a guest. The Korea JoongAng Daily reported that she was then on a world tour taking in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Ann Arbor, Montague and New York, with a release concert at the Kwanglim Arts Center in Seoul on June 6. She gave a quintet concert titled Jazz in New York at the Suwon SK Artrium on September 6, 2024, and was billed to play the Tsuen Wan Town Hall in Hong Kong on December 28, 2024 with the bassist Ji Peng and the drummer Masahiko Osaka; her own biography also lists Blue Note, Cotton Club and Jazz at Lincoln Center Shanghai among her venues.

Her eighth album, Love Letters, was released on May 9, 2025. It is a set of nine songs on the theme of love, recorded with the New York players David Wong on bass and Aaron Seeber on drums and with the saxophonist Grant Stewart, at Teaneck Sound in New Jersey and at Yagi Studio in Seoul, and she made all of the arrangements. It includes Victor Young's title song, her own "You Can Only Hear" and "Letter to Mother", a jazz reading of a Korean song from 1939. The Korean Music Awards nominated it for Best Jazz Vocal Album at the 23rd awards, held in 2026. The committee member who wrote the nominee note said her expression is richer here than on earlier records and singled out the choice of musicians and her "Letter to Mother".

On November 14, 2024 she played two sold-out sessions with the saxophonist Jordan VanHemert, the bassist Rodney Whitaker and the drummer Lewis Nash in the live room of The Church Studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma, recorded for the album that became Something's Gotta Give. According to Yonhap News, the project began when she was invited to record during a student masterclass at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, and she asked for the musicians she had long wanted to play with. The album has nine standards, from "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" and "The Very Thought of You" to "Blue Moon", with the applause largely taken out. Its single "Estate" reached the top of Apple Music's jazz music-video chart, and Kim told Yonhap she thought of the late singer Park Seong-yeon, who often sang that song, while recording it.

Her 2026 has included a summer tour of North America, which Yonhap describes as the first solo tour there by a Korean jazz musician. On August 5 she played the Korean Cultural Center's Onstage Korea series at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington with the bassist Ben Wolstein, the drummer Aaron Seeber and the saxophonists Asaf Yuria and Pureum Jin. On November 15, 2026 she is scheduled to appear at the La Reserve Label Concert at the Sowol Art Hall in Seoul with the vocalists Katie George and Lucy Yeghiazaryan.

She is a singer who accompanies herself, and she says she does not separate vocal and instrumental jazz. In the Yonhap interview she described singing and playing the piano as one idea expressed through two means, her voice and her hands, and she described jazz as a language that lets people of different countries and genders play together. Her repertoire is mostly standards, in changing settings: voice and piano with Cho Yoon-seung, a string ensemble, Brazilian songs, 1960s hard bop, a live quartet.

Her voice is light rather than husky. She told Yonhap that it suits a song such as "Estate", that some listeners have called it thin, and that she believes jazz has grown wide enough to hold such voices. The Berklee and Conservatory years supplied her formal training, and her biography names the pianist Ran Blake among her teachers. No interview in which she names the singers or pianists she follows was found, so this section stays with what the records and her own comments show.