Nery Kim (김네리) is a South Korean jazz pianist and composer who lives and works in the southeastern United States and teaches jazz piano at the University of South Carolina. Her faculty page says she was born in South Korea, Melon, the Korean streaming service, lists her nationality as Korea, and in a ShoutOut LA interview she described herself as a native Korean. No birth date, birth year or hometown has been published, and no source says when she moved to the United States. Her releases bill her as Nery Kim. The cover of Purple Reflection prints the name with the Hangul 네리, and her YouTube uploads and Melon's artist page give 김네리.

She began playing piano at six. In a ColaJazz interview she said she grew up loving gospel music and fell for jazz the moment she heard it in high school. The University of South Carolina lists her training at the Berklee College of Music, the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Southern California. Melon's biography says she completed bachelor's and master's programs at Berklee and CalArts as a scholarship student and then worked mainly in the United States. Degree years and teachers are not published.

Melon's biography describes her Los Angeles work. It says she was the keyboardist in NUMU, a band led by the bassist Sekou Bunch, and played at the Baked Potato and at Alley Studio. It also says she was pianist in the big band of the trumpeter Ron King, a Grammy nominee by Melon's account, and played the Java Jazz Festival in Jakarta and Vitello's in Los Angeles with it, and that she led the Nery Kim Group at Blue Whale and other US venues, with further playing in China, Turkey and Central America. In the ColaJazz interview she named the Java Jazz Festival as one of the best places she has played, recalling how touched she was to see so many young people, including girls in hijabs, running to catch the show. Her university biography adds Indonesia, South Korea, China, Turkey, Central America and the United States to the places she has performed; the year of each trip is not given.

In an undated ShoutOut LA feature written after her debut album and before her second release, when she spoke as a Los Angeles resident, she said she had nearly given up music after a sudden hearing loss and tinnitus of unknown cause that kept her in bed for months and led to several surgeries on her ears. She uses a hearing aid and said things had improved. She also thanked the bassist Younghwan Jin, and described her music as a painting of her thoughts and feelings at the moment a piece is conceived.

Melon says she composed, arranged or played on albums by Jenn Allen, Joomanji, Ron King, 진영환 and 조재현, among others. Discogs lists a Nery Kim with keyboards on "Around The World" on Joomanji's self-released Manj (2013), an album recorded in part at the CalArts Dizzy Gillespie Recording Studio. She plays piano on the Seoul-born bassist Jaehyun Cho's Pursue, recorded in New York in 2019 and released on April 19, 2021.

Her debut album as a leader, Purple Reflection, came out on September 10, 2021. It has eight originals, all composed by her, for a sextet with strings: the trumpeter Alex Sipiagin, the tenor saxophonist Dayna Stephens, the trombonist Alan Ferber, the bassist John Patitucci, the drummer Jonathan Pinson and a string quartet of Chia-Yung Daniel Chin, Seoyeon Im, Li-Jung Chien and Hyelim Kwon. Jason Rostkowski recorded it at GSI Studio in New York, Dave Darlington mixed and mastered it at Bass Hit Recording Studio in New York, and she produced it. Her Bandcamp page describes a modern sound with diverse harmony and a dreamy atmosphere.

Everything since has been released as short projects. Melodies of My Heart (April 20, 2022) is seven tracks of hymn arrangements, the last an instrumental version of the one before it, with the vocalist Torrence Nelson. Joy to the World (November 11, 2022) puts the carol over Latin rhythms. AHOH (2023) pairs her own funk tune "On It", played on Hammond organ and keys with guitar, with an arrangement of Stevie Wonder's "Overjoyed". White Rabbit (December 11, 2024) is a single for four horns and a piano trio. My Father's World (December 17, 2025) is a duo version of the hymn with the bassist Sezin Ahmet Türkmenoğlu.

She is on the jazz faculty at the University of South Carolina School of Music as Instructor of Jazz Piano. A ColaJazz spotlight published on November 4, 2025 said she lived in Augusta, Georgia, and played with a range of musicians from Wycliffe Gordon to Rob Foster as well as with the university's jazz faculty. She played ColaJazz's solo piano series Alone Together in Columbia, South Carolina, on October 5, 2025, and the drummer Lamar Morgan's L4 Jazz Collective, which grew from a trio of Morgan, the bassist Travis Shaw and Kim, on ColaJazz's Loft Sessions on April 27, 2026. Her website lists a Nery Kim Quartet date at The Bierkeller on November 4, 2026, a trio date at Boyd Plaza on November 5, and L4 Jazz dates at Off the Record on November 14 and 21.

Her own description is that her compositions carry colors that are particular to her, and the University of South Carolina credits her with original compositions and a strong harmonic sense. The repertoire she posts is wide: Herbie Hancock's "Sorcerer", Coltrane's "Giant Steps" and "Body and Soul" in a trio setting, keytar solos on Chick Corea's "Spain" and Victor Bailey's "Sweet Tooth", and her own "Love Poem" (戀歌). Her singles lean toward funk and Latin rhythm, and her hymn projects come out of the gospel music she grew up with. The pianist she names as someone others should know is Mulgrew Miller.

Scope matters here. Discogs lists Manj as Contemporary Jazz and Neo Soul, Bandcamp tags her releases as contemporary and modern jazz and jazz piano, and Apple Music files her under Jazz. Melon files Melodies of My Heart under contemporary Christian music and her other releases under jazz. The hymn and carol releases are sacred repertoire played in a jazz idiom, and the jazz clubs, festival dates and jazz-faculty post make jazz her primary identity.