Seoyeon Im (임서연) is a violinist, composer and bandleader who was born in Korea and has worked in New York since about 2018. She also performs and publishes online as V.OLIN (브이올린). Her recording career under her own name is very new: the single "Up In The Air" came out on July 3, 2026, "Q Train" followed on July 25, and her debut album New World reached streaming services on August 16, 2026. Before that her recorded work was as a string player and guest. The city and date of her birth are not published; the West Side Spirit gave her age as 36 in June 2026. She gives her real name as Im Seoyeon in a Korean interview from 2016, and her own releases bill her as Seoyeon Im, the form used here.

Her Korean background is real but mostly documented from the years before she left. She studied classical violin in Korea, and her website and an event biography say she studied at Sungshin Women's University in Seoul. In a 2026 interview she says she wanted a little more freedom than classical music allowed and busked a lot in Korea, where she met a man who asked what would happen if she studied seriously and came back. That conversation, she says, is why she applied to Berklee College of Music. Beyond that 2016 interview, no Korean jazz festival appearance, Korean award or Korean-language jazz coverage was found, and her jazz career is a New York one.

Before jazz she was a Korean online video creator. Culture News (문화뉴스) interviewed her on July 26, 2016 as the maker of V:OLIN, a channel that arranged Korean pop songs, Christmas carols and film and television themes as instrumental violin videos, made with a small video team. She had passed 1,000 YouTube subscribers, said she began the channel in late 2015 and named The Piano Guys as the group whose videos pushed her to start, adding that she had played in the orchestra at their Korean concert the year before. Her favorite violin acts, she said, were Lindsey Stirling and Time for Three, and the channel's name was chosen by her younger sibling to suggest both "victory" and the instrument. In the same interview she said she would leave in August 2016 for about two years at Berklee in Boston, to study jazz and contemporary music after her classical training. Her own website now claims more than 60,000 YouTube subscribers and more than 20 million cumulative views on the V.OLIN channel, and a 2023 event biography already cited 90,000 followers across social media.

At Berklee she gave a student recital, Seoyeon Im with Strings, on June 23, 2017 at the Oliver Colvin Recital Hall in Boston, presenting her own compositions and arrangements with a string quartet. After about two years there she moved to New York for a master's degree in jazz at Queens College, City University of New York; the degree is called jazz studies in two sources and jazz performance on her own site. She told the West Side Spirit in 2026 that she had planned to return to Korea after graduating, wanting to bring jazz knowledge home, but kept meeting people and decided she needed more experience; ten years after leaving, she is still in the United States. The pandemic stalled her start in New York. She began joining other musicians' jam sessions and exploring gypsy jazz, and work followed.

Her first documented recording as a jazz string player is Somewhere (Rosebud Music, 2019), the duo album by the singer Peter Eldridge and the pianist Kenny Werner, with a string orchestra conducted by the cellist Eugene Friesen. Discogs lists a violin credit for Sienna Seoyeon Im among ten violinists, and her own event biography from 2023 says she recorded the album, which is why the credit is taken as hers. That same biography says she has also collaborated with the pianist Tigran Hamasyan and the tango pianist Pablo Ziegler, and that she was invited to play at the American String Teachers Association conference in Atlanta; no recording or program was found for those. On November 2, 2023 she played the concert Autumn in New York: Concerto Night at Williamsburg at the E4 Foundation in Brooklyn. In 2024 she was the featured artist on "Telisi Rama," a single by the New York singer and violinist Rini.

In New York she leads the Seoyeon Im Quartet, a violin, piano, bass and drums group that plays mainly her own compositions at the Zinc Bar in the West Village and at The Red Pavilion in Bushwick, where she also runs a monthly Studio Ghibli jazz series of film melodies in new arrangements. Her band page also lists the Rhythm Roses, a swing and gypsy jazz trio or quartet, and the Brooklyn String Quartet, which her biography says she founded. She plays in the Glad Rags Orchestra, a ten-piece dance band devoted to 1920s and 1930s music, which was scheduled to play at Lincoln Center's Josie Robertson Plaza on July 8, 2026. Her website lists the Rhythm Roses at Rosevale in New York on November 19 and a Christmas concert at the Zinc Bar on December 23, 2026.

New World is a seven-track record of pieces credited to her as composer, for a jazz quartet with piano, double bass and drums, a string quartet on three tracks and her own violin overdubs on two more, recorded at Blue Frog Studio and mixed and mastered at Sear Sound. Her notes describe it as a portrait of a Korean musician building a new identity in New York, and several titles are autobiographical: "Q Train" is about her subway commute over the Manhattan Bridge, and "Kiki In The New World" joins the second movement of Dvořák's New World Symphony to Studio Ghibli's Kiki's Delivery Service. A CD with a 12-page booklet and a digital edition are listed on her Bandcamp page with a release date of September 1, 2026. This is her first and so far only album, and the sources found do not yet include a review of it.

Im describes her music as the meeting of classical strings, jazz improvisation and cinematic writing, and the evidence from her releases and band pages supports a mix of three strands. The first is chamber-scale jazz: her quartet with piano, bass and drums, joined by a string quartet on the album. The second is the swing and gypsy jazz idiom she took up in New York jam sessions and now plays with the Rhythm Roses and, in a more written-out form, with the Glad Rags Orchestra. The third is film and anime melody, in her Studio Ghibli series and in "Kiki In The New World." Her notes say "Rain Drop" came from six months of weekly jam sessions in Manhattan and is influenced by gypsy jazz and swing.

In 2016 she named Lindsey Stirling and Time for Three as favorite violin acts, and The Piano Guys as the example that started her video work. She has said that classical music has to be played as written and that jazz offered her the freedom to take risks. No later interview in which she lists jazz influences was found, so this section stays with her own descriptions and releases.