Yulhee Kim (김율희) is a pansori singer, a sorikkun in Korean, born in Gwangju, who works across the line between Korea's traditional vocal art and jazz, reggae and theatre. ECM Records and Discogs print her name as Yulhee Kim, the NST & The Soul Sauce releases bill her as Kim Yulhee, and Korean newspapers write Kim Yul-hee. She sings and plays percussion in the Near East Quartet, whose self-titled 2018 album is on ECM, and she is the vocal partner on the pansori-reggae records of the Seoul band NST & The Soul Sauce. Her main identity is still pansori: she is a successor-student in the pansori Chunhyangga tradition and has performed the full-length Heungbo-ga and Chunhyang-ga on her own.

No birth date is published. Korean newspapers gave her age as 34 in November 2022 and 37 in April 2025, which in Korean age counting points to a birth year around 1989. The Korea Times described her in 2018 as a Gwangju-born singer who had been in pansori for about twenty years since her youth, and the Kyunghyang Shinmun reported in 2022 that she began singing pansori at nine. Her teachers named in the Korea Times were the late Sung Woo-hyang, Park Ae-ri and Han Seung-suk. The Kyunghyang describes her as a completed successor-student (isuja) of Chunhyangga under the National Intangible Cultural Heritage designation, number 5. She won the grand prize at the 2013 National Namdo Folk Song Contest, according to the Korea Times, and KPI News reports a pansori prize at the KBS Gugak Awards (the year is not given). The Kyunghyang adds that she stood on the stage of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics closing ceremony with a pansori she composed herself.

Her pansori is grounded in the tradition she studied, and she told the Korea Times in 2018 that she goes for something more modern in collaborations while her own pansori remains mostly traditional. That is also how the jazz world meets her: the Near East Quartet's ECM text says her voice carries messages from pansori epics and folk song and that she contributes to the improvisatory flow as a percussionist, and Songlines placed the band's stylistic cues in pansori's way of musical storytelling. The reggae records use the same material from the other direction. Noh Seon-teck has said that pansori and minyo, like reggae, are music that shouts for freedom and truth and mocks corrupt rulers with humor, and that traditional music should be treated as a living thing.

Whether she counts as a jazz artist is a fair question. For: the ECM album is on a jazz label and was reviewed by DownBeat and Songlines, Discogs files it under jazz, and the same quartet played the EFG London Jazz Festival; Version is tagged by Discogs as jazz, reggae and folk, with soul-jazz and min'yo among its styles; and her other recordings are with a jazz saxophonist, a Korean-European jazz project and a jazz bassist. Against: she describes her pansori as mostly traditional, her prizes are mainly traditional and crossover ones, the Korean Music Awards honored the quartet in the Crossover category rather than the jazz ones, Apple Music files Duologue under Korean Classical, and most of her output is pansori performance and theatre. She is best placed as a pansori singer who is a regular member and guest in jazz and crossover groups, so the Subgenres above are the nearest jazz categories rather than a claim that she is a jazz singer first.