Originally from South Korea, multi-instrumentalist YuEun Gemma Kim started playing piano at age 5 years old and the violin at 7, although she enjoyed singing Korean and American pop songs from the 80’s with her father the most. She also used to play organ every Wednesday at 6am at the church services.

She moved to the US about 7 years ago to study at University of Southern California under the tutelage of violinist Midori Goto, where she also grew her passion for Baroque music while playing with The USC Thornton Baroque Sinfonia. Since then, she’s been exploring the early music repertoire which brought her to attend the American Bach Soloists Academy in 2019. This year, she is invited to play with various baroque ensembles including Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, Boulder Bach Festival and Blue Hill Bach (Maine).

She is not a big fan of competitions, however, she has been participating in quite a few of them and has won first place in USC’s Solo Bach Competition and the Strings Concerto Competition, and was a semi-finalist at the Qingdao International Violin Competition (China) and the Michael Hill International Violin Competition (New Zealand). The most memorable competition was the Boulder International Competition: Art of Duo, where she won second in prize with her pianist Sung Chang.

YuEun is a core member of Delirium Musicum, a self-conducted chamber orchestra based in Los Angeles. During the pandemic, Delirium Musicum created MusiKaravan which took YuEun and Artistic Director, Etienne Gara, on the road in a vintage Volkswagen bus to perform socially-distanced concerts for farm workers, winemakers, random passerby, and even the occasional ostrich. The video episodes of this musical journey will start streaming in late spring 2021.

Her Chopin’s Nocturne video on YouTube has over 9 million views and the funniest moment in her performing career was when she noticed Itzhak Perlman was in the audience; she couldn’t turn the pages and she ended up playing the whole Haydn string quartet by heart.