Mina Yu (유민아) is a pianist, composer and educator who was born in Korea and has lived in Melbourne, Australia, since moving there from the United States. Her Hangul name appears in the title of her own YouTube channel, "Mina Piano 유민아". Her birth city and date are not published. In a 2022 interview with AustralianJazz.net she spoke of "my own birth country of Korea," and Berklee College of Music's alumni page calls her a native of Korea who began playing at age four under her mother, an accomplished piano teacher. No source found states her citizenship; her own website calls her a Korean-Australian pianist and composer.

She trained in the United States. She took a Bachelor of Music at Berklee in 2012 and a Master of Music in jazz performance at the Manhattan School of Music in 2015, where she held the CJ Culture Scholarship and the school's own merit scholarship. Her bio says she spent seven years in New York and Boston before relocating to Australia. In that time she worked as a bandleader, sideman, musical director and teacher, and a 2015 feature lists her on the faculty of LaGuardia Community College and York College, as regular pianist at the Manhattan Country School in 2015 and 2016, and as musical director for the hip-hop group Crossculture. The same feature names Webster Hall, Joe's Pub, New York Live Arts, The Bitter End and Carnegie Hall among her New York venues, and her website lists Carnegie Hall in October 2015 and Columbia University that year. It also lists Guilfest in England in 2011 and the Jazzaar Festival in Switzerland, where the 2015 feature says she played with the guitarist Adam Rogers, the pianist Helen Sung and the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington. Her website adds that she performed with the Grammy-winning artists Greg Osby, Carrington and Dave Samuels in 2012 and 2013; those performances are stated in her own bio and not documented on a recording found.

Her first album as a leader came out while she was in New York. Papa's Records, released in May 2015 under the billing Mina Yu Project, is a six-track set that a 2015 blog feature describes as a re-creation of her father's LP collection, jazz-based but mixing 1970s funk rhythms, rap and jazz vocals into originals that it calls part American and part Korean. The single "Incantation" had come out on March 16, 2015, and Berklee's alumni office promoted the album with a podcast page and that track. In January 2015 she flew to South Korea for shows at All That Jazz in Itaewon, Seoul, and Club Monk in Changwon, according to the 2015 feature.

By 2018 she was playing in Melbourne. Her website lists the Melbourne International Jazz Festival in 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2024, and a 2022 listing says she was musical director and pianist for the 2018 Melbourne concert of the K-pop singer Tae Woo Kim of the group g.o.d. On records she is the pianist on Richard Pavlidis's Without Within (2019), the pianist on two tracks of ZEDSIX's hip-hop and jazz project The Shape of Jazz (2020), and a guest on albums by SKOV, Aaron Searle and Cameron McIntyre. She also works with the singer Fem Belling, whose band Kon Shes and duo FEMINA she has played in, and with the drummer Ben Charnley, who co-produced her recent album.

Her Melbourne concert programs are often built around a story. In December 2022 she presented Migrant's Home at the Melbourne Recital Centre with Belling, the bassist Simon Starr and Charnley, a concert she described as her story as an immigrant told through music, running from the Korean music her parents listened to, through the gospel music she played every Sunday in the United States, to the jazz clubs of New York. Since then she has led the Mina Yu Quartet in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a jazz setting of Milan Kundera's novel with narration, at Monash University's Count's venue on July 24, 2024 and at Kew Court House in May 2025. Her website also lists a Studio Ghibli project with strings and a Charlie Brown Christmas show at the Paris Cat Jazz Club, a program of Korean drama and film themes at the same club from 2025, and a Mina Yu Quartet date at the Cotton Club in Seoul in 2025. She hosted the Melbourne International Jazz Festival's late-night jam session in 2024.

A Day and Life, her second album, is solo piano: nine pieces, all credited to her as composer and performer, from "Waking Up" to "Sleeping At The End Of The Day," recorded at Newmarket Studios in Melbourne with Charnley as co-producer and released on June 14, 2025. The Jazz Lab in Brunswick hosted the album launch that evening, with the bassist Stephen Hornby and Charnley joining her for a solo and trio program. Her own website says the album was nominated for the 2025 Australian Music Prize; the prize's published shortlist for 2025 names nine other albums. She teaches jazz piano at the University of Melbourne (Victorian College of the Arts) and at Monash College and works as an assessor for the Australian Music Examinations Board. The Australian Jazz Real Book, the sheet-music collection of Australian jazz tunes, lists five of her compositions: "Back to Black," "All Good," "I'm Yours," "I Can't Understand Your English" and "Montmarte."

Yu names Herbie Hancock and Eliane Elias among the jazz pianists who shaped her playing, alongside the classical composers Erik Satie and Maurice Ravel. For A Day and Life she adds Bill Evans, The Beatles and Sting. Her own website describes her work as joining jazz with classical, experimental and intercultural influences, and a festival listing says her playing blends lyrical jazz with classical nuance and East Asian sensibilities. In her 2022 interview she said she grew up listening to Korean pop from the 1980s, including Kim Kwang-seok and Yoo Jae-ha, to African American gospel and to classical and jazz, and that her music draws on all of them.

The records show two sides. Papa's Records is a band record with a groove, built on originals and a standard, with funk rhythms and some rap and vocals. A Day and Life is quiet, unhurried solo piano; Bandcamp tags it jazz, neo-classical and meditative, and Apple Music files it under New Age. A 2025 radio interview summarized her as a musician who works in both the classical and jazz worlds rather than only as a jazz player. Her piano work on other people's records and her teaching, festival and club work are all in jazz, and her master's degree is in jazz performance, so the profile treats her as a jazz pianist whose own solo writing leans toward classical-influenced crossover.