Okkyung Lee (이옥경) is a cellist, composer and improviser born in 1975 in South Korea who has lived and worked in New York since 2000. English Wikipedia and Wikidata name Daejeon as her birthplace, while her Berklee and personal biographies say only that she is a native of South Korea; no day or month of birth is published. Wikidata records South Korean citizenship. In 2025 she was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program, and her Bandcamp page now gives Berlin as her base.

Her Korean years were spent largely in music schools. She told Clot magazine that her mother chose the cello for her at the age of six, that she left home at 12 to attend a classical music and art school in Seoul, and that she spent her teens living alone in the city, reading novels and comic books and watching videotapes. She told ATTN magazine in 2017 that the cello she plays is an old French instrument, bought for her in New York by a friend of her father's when she was 12 and needed a serious instrument. In the liner notes to Cheol-Kkot-Sae she writes that her training was almost entirely in the European classical tradition and that nobody ever asked her to study Korean traditional music.

She arrived in Boston in 1993. By her own account she knew little about jazz until Berklee College of Music, where she first heard Miles Davis and John Coltrane and bought CDs to catch up. She graduated from Berklee in 1998 with a dual degree in contemporary writing and production and film scoring, then took a master's degree in contemporary improvisation at the New England Conservatory of Music, which her biographies date to 2000. She told Clot that she only felt a real connection to her cello after she began at the conservatory in 1998.

In 2000 she moved to New York and joined the downtown scene. Early recording credits include the conductor Lawrence "Butch" Morris's Jump Arts Orchestra on Conduction 117 (recorded April 13, 2001) and the saxophonist Assif Tsahar's New York Underground Orchestra on The Labyrinth (recorded February 25, 2002). She says her first European concert was at the Venice Biennale with Morris in 2003. Her own first record, Nihm (Tzadik, 2005), was executive-produced by John Zorn, who then used her on Femina (2009) and on Dictée / Liber Novus (2010), where she plays cello and speaks the Korean narration of "Dictée," a piece dedicated to the writer Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha.

The jazz and improvised-music side of her work is documented in a run of records from 2007 onward. She plays cello on thirteen tracks of Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd's Still Life with Commentator (2007) and on thirteen of their Holding It Down: The Veterans' Dreams Project (2013, Pi Recordings). In 2009 she joined Wadada Leo Smith's electric ensemble Organic for the second disc of Spiritual Dimensions (Cuneiform), recorded live at Firehouse 12 in New Haven on April 17, 2009. She recorded the trio album The Bleeding Edge (psi, 2011) with Evan Parker and Peter Evans at St Peter's Church in Whitstable on May 4, 2010, and is the cellist on Parker's ElectroAcoustic Septet album Seven (Victo, recorded at Victoriaville in May 2014). Emanem released Check for Monsters (2009), her trio concerts with Evans and Steve Beresford from March 2008.

Her own composed and solo work ran in parallel. Noisy Love Songs (For George Dyer) (Tzadik, 2011) gathers a band of Craig Taborn on piano, Chris Tordini on bass, Satoshi Takeishi on percussion and electronics, Peter Evans on trumpet and Cornelius Dufallo on violin. Ghil (Ideologic Organ, 2013) is a solo set recorded in spring 2012 in Oslo, Nesodden and Rjukan with the Norwegian musician Lasse Marhaug, who captured it on a portable cassette recorder from 1976 with no overdubs, according to Clot. She toured with the band Swans from 2015 to 2017 and plays cello on their album The Glowing Man (2016), received a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in 2015 after a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in 2010, and played the Monterey Jazz Festival in September 2015.

In April 2016 she played the closing concert of Cecil Taylor's Open Plan exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York. A Whitney recording dated April 23, 2016 was issued in January 2026 as Words & Music (The Last Bandstand) by Cecil Taylor New Unit, with Lee on cello beside Taylor on piano, Tony Oxley on electronics, Harri Sjöström on saxophones and Jackson Krall on drums. Six months later, on October 15, 2016, she presented Cheol-Kkot-Sae (Steel.Flower.Bird) at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, a work commissioned by SWR2 for her own cello, four other improvisers (John Butcher, John Edwards, Ches Smith and Marhaug) and two Korean traditional musicians, the pansori singer Song-Hee Kwon and the percussionist Jae-Hyo Chang. Tzadik issued the live recording in 2018, and the Free Jazz Collective gave it four and a half stars.

Her Yeo-Neun Quartet, with the harpist Maeve Gilchrist, the pianist Jacob Sacks and the bassist Eivind Opsvik, began in 2016 as a week at The Stone and made its first record, Yeo-Neun (Shelter Press), in 2020. Bandcamp Daily called it a surprise even for her biggest fans, a set of careful, intricate songs. The same year came Teum (The Silvery Slit), a roughly twenty-minute piece for cello and prerecorded sound written for the GRM's acousmonium. Na-Reul (Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2021) followed as a solo set, Two Duos (Otoroku, 2022) with Jérôme Noetinger and Nadia Ratsimandresy, Just Like Any Other Day (Shelter Press, September 2025), and Signals (FLUNG, March 2026), a piece for the London ensemble Explore Ensemble commissioned by Transit Festival, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Rainy Days in Luxembourg.

Korea stays in her diary. Her own performance list records a multichannel cello piece for the Nam June Paik Art Center at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2013 and a performance at the Center's July 2021 birthday event for Paik, a sound installation there with Kim Hee-Cheon from August to November 2021, a September 2021 showcase at Mullae Art Factory in Seoul, a November 2021 improvisation with Kwon and Chang for Korean Traditional Music Radio, a Gwangju World Music Festival set for six performers in August 2024 and a solo performance of Silpuri at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul that September. On June 13 to 15, 2024 she held a three-day residency at Cafe OTO in London, and the pianist Eunyoung Kim and Jun Young Song joined her trio with John Butcher and John Edwards for the last night.

Lee's catalogue is split between two scenes, and the split is part of how to read her. On the jazz and improvised-music side, her partners are Parker, Evans, Butcher, Edwards, Smith, Corsano, Wadada Leo Smith, Iyer and Taylor, the Free Jazz Collective reviews her records, Discogs tags The Bleeding Edge, Check for Monsters, SKEIN and White Cable, Black Wires as free improvisation, Cheol-Kkot-Sae and Libra Rising as avant-garde or free jazz, and the listings site Jazz Right Now carries her page. On the other side are her records with noise and experimental musicians (Lasse Marhaug, C. Spencer Yeh, Bill Orcutt, Swans), commissions for the GRM and for museums and contemporary-music festivals, and releases on Ecstatic Peace!, Editions Mego, Mute and Shelter Press that have no jazz tag at all. Her own descriptions use the words cellist, composer and improviser rather than jazz musician.

Her biography lists noise, improvisation, jazz, Western classical and the traditional and popular music of Korea as her sources. The cello is played viscerally in the solo work, with guttural tones from the body of the instrument and scraped and shredded strings; in a 2015 London interview quoted by Berklee she said she began playing noise on the cello because only certain sounds made her feel it presented who she is. Ghil and Dahl-Tah-Ghi, both recorded in Norway, are the plainest examples.

A second line is lyrical and composed. She says her pieces have always carried a sentimentality that comes from her years alone in Seoul as a teenager, and that she learned to stop hiding it behind difficult music. Yeo-Neun is the clearest case: its track titles borrow from Korean ballads, "In Stardust (For Kang Kyung-ok)" is inspired by a science-fiction comic she loved at 15, and the quartet it was written for is her longest-lasting group. Na-Reul and Just Like Any Other Day carry Hangul titles, and the latter includes a piece called "Hidden Road (For Yoo Jae-ha)."

A third line is Korean material turned into improvisation. Cheol-Kkot-Sae sets pansori singing and Korean percussion against free playing and electronics, and its starting point was her realization in Boston that she sang Korean traditional songs whenever she was alone. The Free Jazz Collective's reviewer notes that she chose the players in the spirit of Cecil Taylor's remark that a composition begins with the selection of the musicians.