Rin Seo (서린) is a composer, conductor and pianist born in Seoul, South Korea, who has lived and worked in New York since she came to the United States in 2015 to study jazz. She has made one record so far: City Suite (Cellar Music, October 3, 2025), the debut of her 14-piece chamber jazz orchestra, the Rin Seo Collective. She wrote and conducted the album and does not play on it. Her website gives her birth year as 1990, and the ASCAP Foundation's 2020 list of young jazz composers gave her age as 29, living in Long Island City, New York, with Seoul, South Korea as her place of origin. No source gives her month and day of birth or her citizenship.

She is billed Rin Seo, given name first, on her own releases and concert listings. The cover of City Suite, its Bandcamp page, the CD and its Discogs entry bill the album to the Rin Seo Collective, with "Rin Seo" credited as composer and conductor, and streaming services list the album under Rin Seo alone. The Hangul 서린 appears on her own events page, which bills a November 3, 2023 concert at the JCC Art Center as 서린 프로젝트: 라지 앙상블, a large-ensemble date.

Her Korean grounding is early and long. The BMI Foundation says she grew up in Seoul, and her own biography gives a Bachelor of Music in classical composition from Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul. In a January 2026 interview she said she began classical piano at six and started writing music at 17, that her school made students write atonal music, which she disliked at the time, and that curiosity about jazz harmony and improvisation then led her to study jazz abroad. A teacher recommended Berklee College of Music. When the BMI Foundation announced her scholarship she put her classical study at twenty years and said she came to the United States in 2015.

At Berklee she was awarded a scholarship and earned a Professional Diploma, and the Berklee Concert Jazz Orchestra performed one of her compositions in 2018. She then took a master's degree in jazz composition at the Manhattan School of Music, studying with Jim McNeely, who became her mentor and who gave the album a strong endorsement. She received the BMI Foundation's Chuckii Booker Scholarship, a $5,000 prize for a young jazz composer at a U.S. music school, which her biography dates to 2019, and the ASCAP Foundation's Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award in 2020. Her biography adds a DownBeat Student Music Award in 2020 and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Korean Cultural Center New York and the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. The fellow Seoul-born composer Jisu Jung is on the same 2020 ASCAP list. In 2025 the Seattle Women's Jazz Orchestra named her the winner of its ninth annual composition contest for women composers, for "Desert Flower."

Before the album she led larger groups under her own name in New York. Her website lists a Rin Seo Jazz Orchestra date at Shapeshifter Lab on October 26, 2021, a 17-piece Rin Seo Orchestra concert at Culture Lab LIC on December 8, 2022, and appearances in the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop showcases and The Jazz Gallery's Jazz Composers' Showcase series. Her chamber music has a Korean thread: on April 30, 2021, in Korean Cultural Center New York's Open Stage Program, she premiered a chamber arrangement of the folk song "Arirang" and "Floating," which adds the Korean mouth organ saenghwang to reeds and piano and which she wrote about the unsettled mind of immigrants. The Korean Cultural Center also presented her on December 19, 2023 at Flushing Town Hall, sharing the evening with the Taiwan-born composer Tracy Yang, in a concert that introduced her new 14-piece chamber jazz orchestra. Her site also lists two big-band arrangements commissioned by the Mabinogi Jarasumjazz Big Band, premiered on October 9, 2023 at the 20th Jarasum International Jazz Festival in Korea.

City Suite was recorded at the Power Station in New York on September 18 and 19, 2024. Its first three tracks make up the title suite, a portrait of New York in three movements: "The Big Apple," "Cityscape" and "Alone, but Not Alone." Four more originals follow, "Lullaby," "Desert Flower," "Music for Dance No. 2" and "Riding a Bike," along with her arrangement of Wayne Shorter's "Blues a la Carte." The band joins a big-band front line and rhythm section to a string quartet, and its guests include the trumpeter Ingrid Jensen on "Desert Flower" and "Riding a Bike" and the saxophonist Steve Wilson. Alan Ferber and Seo produced it, with Cory Weeds of Cellar Music and Jongyool Lee among the executive producers. Seo has said she met Jensen at the Manhattan School of Music, where Jensen spontaneously took a solo during a big-band rehearsal of one of Seo's pieces, and that she then hoped to feature her on a debut record.

All About Jazz reviewed the album twice, with Jack Bowers on October 18, 2025 and Angelo Leonardi in Italian on June 25, 2026. Allen Michie wrote in ArtsFuse that the album placed among the top ten debut recordings of 2025 in the Francis Davis Jazz Poll, in which he voted. In February 2026 it was named one of four nominees for the Deutscher Jazzpreis in the Debut Album of the Year (International) category; the prize went in April 2026 to yonglee & the DOLTANG, the Seoul quintet. Seo led a release concert at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, New Jersey on February 28, 2026 and, according to her events page, a listening party for the album in Seoul on March 28, 2026.

Her Korean connection today is real but thin on the evidence. She was born, schooled and trained as a composer in Seoul, and the people and institutions that have presented and funded her include Korean Cultural Center New York, the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture and a Korean festival. Her career, though, has been in New York for a decade. In the same January 2026 interview she said she does not know much about the current Korean jazz scene, though she has heard it is growing fast, and she hopes to play in Korea, the United States and Europe.

Seo describes her music as a blend of Western classical music, jazz, theater and Korean folk music, and writes for what she calls a chamber jazz orchestra, a big band joined to strings. Reviewers hear the Gil Evans tradition of mixing instruments across sections and putting rhythmic expression ahead of swing, and Allen Michie names Maria Schneider as a clear influence. Angelo Leonardi places the album in modern orchestral mainstream jazz, rich in groove and drawing on Latin rhythms, with the strings used lightly. Jack Bowers praises how she uses every part of the ensemble to paint the city.

Her pieces tend to start from a subject. In the interview she said that when she is asked for a piece she goes to a museum or a park to find the story, then sits at the piano, improvises and writes down the melodies, which grow from there. City Suite follows that method: three movements on New York, a "Lullaby" she dedicated to a late cousin and friend and to others she has lost, "Desert Flower" in honor of the Somali women's-rights activist Waris Dirie (as ArtsFuse reports), and an Afro-Cuban piece inspired by modern dance. Her "Blues a la Carte" reworks Wayne Shorter's composition substantially. Her concert catalog also lists orchestral, chamber and solo piano pieces, and arrangements of Korean folk songs such as "Arirang" and "Blue Bird."