Sunny Kim (써니킴) is a vocalist, composer and improviser born in Seoul on June 6, 1979, who has led six albums and now lives in Melbourne, Australia, where she lectures in jazz and improvisation at the University of Melbourne. Wikidata gives her Korean name as 김윤선 (Kim Yun-seon); Korean newspapers print the name she performs under as 써니킴 or 써니 킴. Her working life falls into three stretches: study and early work in the United States, a decade or so based in Seoul from 2007, and Australia since the late 2010s. She turned 47 in June 2026.

Her father's career took the family abroad when she was a child, to Malaysia and Thailand according to JazzTimes, and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's biography names Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok. She says she was singing before she could speak, studied classical piano from the age of seven and sang in school choirs in Korea and at international schools. A scholarship took her to the University of Denver, where her CV lists a bachelor's degree in jazz studies and voice (1998 to 2002). She told the Hankyoreh that she changed her major to jazz after sitting in on a friend's class and hearing students improvise. She then studied at the New England Conservatory in Boston (master's degree, 2003 to 2005), with teachers her CV lists as Dominique Eade, Bob Moses, John McNeil, Charlie Banacos, Frank Carlberg, Jerry Bergonzi and Danilo Perez. JazzTimes adds that she took Steve Lacy's composition course, taught for the most part by Carlberg because of Lacy's illness. An early recording credit is with the Boston group Prana Trio, with the drummer Brian Adler and the bassist Evan Halloin, on After Dark (Circavision, 2004).

New York followed. She joined Myth of Mitch (the guitarist Sasha Brown, the pianist David Bryant and the drummer Jason Nazary), the band named on her first album under her own name, and the bassist Trevor Dunn recruited her as the singer of his band MadLove, which made White With Foam (Ipecac, 2009). The trombonist Roswell Rudd first heard her at a memorial concert for Lacy, according to JazzTimes, and invited her to sing on his quartet album Keep Your Heart Right (Sunnyside, 2008), a set of his songs of which several had earlier been sung by Sheila Jordan. Discogs credits her with vocals on that record and, three years later, on three tracks of Rudd's The Incredible Honk (2011), including the Korean folk song "Arirang". Her CV lists the Roswell Rudd Quartet at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2007 and Korean newspapers, the Seoul Shinmun and Tenasia among them, reported that she was the first Korean invited to Newport.

In 2007 she went back to Seoul. JazzTimes describes a 28-year-old who had spent half her life abroad and felt like a stranger in her native country, and who found her way back through a book of paintings and poems by the Korean artist Sun Doo Kim, U-Turning to You. The decade that followed is well documented in Korean sources. Her first album as a leader, Android Ascension (YDS Music, South Korea, 2008), an experimental record that mixed jazz with electronics, earned her the nickname "Korea's Bjork" in the Hankyoreh. She appeared as a guest on records by Korean jazz musicians, among them the Seo Young Do Trio, Jangeun Bae and Kyung Yoon Nam, and sang at the Jarasum International Jazz Festival in 2008 with the Bjorkestra project and again in 2015 with the Berlin Seoul Project. The Seoul Shinmun (2014) lists her as an adjunct professor of practical music at Hanyang University, and her CV lists adjunct posts at Dong-Ah Institute of Media and Arts (2008 to 2012) and Hanyang (2011 to 2015), with a later Dong-Ah faculty post in 2017 and 2018. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's biography credits Korea Arts Council grants for three interdisciplinary pieces: Act of Resolution (2011) and Diaspora (2012), both with the dancer and choreographer Sung Yong Kim, and the Painter's Eye project with Sun Doo Kim. The same biography says her composition "Everywhere" was used in the soundtrack of the 2010 film Late Autumn, directed by Kim Tae-yong.

Painter's Eye (Sunnyside, 2012) is the record that made that return audible. She set Sun Doo Kim's poems, with Korean lyrics, for a band that Darius Jones produced and that included Ben Monder on guitar, Angelica Sanchez on piano, Chris Speed on tenor saxophone and clarinet, Sean Conly on bass and the drummers Richie Barshay and Pheeroan akLaff. Sunnyside released it in New York in August 2012; the Korea Times reported its Korean release in July 2013, and she played a release concert at the Hongdae club Auteur that September. Jazz People magazine's readers named her best vocalist in 2012 and 2013, and the LIG Arts Foundation gave her an artist award in 2011. A Seoul Shinmun interview of February 2014 shows her at work on a concert of songs by ten women composers, from the lyricist Dorothy Fields to Abbey Lincoln, planned for Auteur on the 23rd.

Her duo with Ben Monder, who first knew her music from a Prana Trio demo in 2004, produced The Shining Sea: Live at the Olympus Hall (Audioguy Records, South Korea, 2014), recorded at the Olympus Hall in the Samsung-dong district of Seoul in September 2013. The Dream of the Earth followed on the Korean label ADVART Music (2016), after concerts at the Arario Museum in Seoul, and Tribute (2019), a record for voice and piano with the pianist Youngjoo Song (송영주), pays homage to women musicians; her CV lists a Seoul concert of it at JCC Hall in 2019. Her CV lists Korean Music Awards best jazz record nominations for those three albums, which it dates to 2014, 2017 and 2019, and it also lists the Chilpo International Jazz Festival (2012), the Seoul Jazz Festival with the big band of Sung Jo Chung (2013) and the Tribowl Jazz Festival in Incheon (2017). A news photograph of the Tribowl set shows her singing with the Song Youngjoo trio on August 26, 2017.

She moved her base to Australia around 2018, when her CV shows her lecturing at the University of Melbourne. Her ties to the Australian Art Orchestra go back to her time as faculty leader of its Creative Music Intensive (2015 to 2017). Since 2017 she has worked with the Yolngu songmen Daniel and David Wilfred in the ensemble Hand to Earth, which she shares with the trumpeter Peter Knight and the clarinettist Aviva Endean. Its album Hand to Earth (2021) was nominated for the 2022 ARIA Award for Best World Music Album, according to Wikipedia, and the group received an Inspire Award at the 2026 Asia Pacific Arts Awards. In 2023 she released Liminal Silence (Earshift Music) with the pianist Vardan Ovsepian and Ben Monder, which was a nominee at the 21st Korean Music Awards in 2024. Her website also lists the 2023 APRA AMCOS Art Music Award for Performance of the Year and the 2024 Music Victoria Award for Best Experimental Work, and she gave the Australian Music Centre's Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address in 2020.

Citizenship is not stated in the sources: Wikidata lists South Korea, and Wikipedia calls her a Korean-Australian vocalist when it describes Hand to Earth. The header uses South Korean on the strength of her birth in Seoul and the Korean career described above.

She is a vocalist who writes and improvises her own material more than she interprets standards. She told the Hankyoreh that she would rather not stay put like a museum piece and wants music that is her own and goes beyond the voice carrying it, and she credits Roswell Rudd with the idea that a musician plays a soul, not an instrument. Her website describes a sound world that moves between jazz, experimental, traditional and electronic idioms, with extended vocal techniques and live processing of her voice.

Critics hear the same range. JazzTimes finds Painter's Eye expressive but controlled, with a sparseness that Darius Jones says he wanted because it resembles Korean aesthetics. Cadence compared her electronically manipulated vocals to the early work of Ursula Dudziak, and Musique Machine heard her processed voice rising over the band like an aurora. Songlines, reviewing Liminal Silence in March 2024, wrote that the record defies easy categorisation, moving between ambient landscapes, experimental jazz balladry and improvisation, and her website cites DownBeat as hearing it as spiritual and otherworldly.

Korean material and instruments are part of the sound. The Painter's Eye poems are sung in Korean, and on The Shining Sea Discogs credits her with temple bells and a kkwaenggwari, a small Korean gong, beside voice and electronics. The influences she names in interviews are Ben Monder, whom she called one of her strongest musical influences in a 2013 Tenasia interview, Steve Lacy, Roswell Rudd and the women composers she researched for her 2014 Seoul concert.

Her releases also sit close to improvised and experimental music, and the Australian work with Yolngu songmen is as much intercultural collaboration as jazz. The case for calling her primarily a jazz artist rests on her jazz studies at two conservatories, her faculty posts in practical music in Korea and in jazz and improvisation in Australia, her place in Korean jazz readers' polls and the jazz category of the Korean Music Awards, and the jazz festivals and clubs she has played.