Soyeon Kate Lee

Korean-American pianist Soyeon Kate Lee (BM ’01, MM ’03, Artist Diploma ’05), who joined the Juilliard faculty in July 2022, won first prize in the Naumburg International Piano Competition and the Concert Artist Guild International Competition. Highlights of recent seasons include appearances at the National Gallery, Library of Congress, Gina Bachauer Concerts, Purdue Convocations, San Francisco Performances, and the Cleveland Art Museum. She is a regular participant in numerous music festivals including the Great Lakes, Santa Fe, and Music Mountain chamber music festivals, and has collaborated with conductors Carlos Miguel Prieto, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Jahja Ling, and Jorge Mester with the London, San Diego, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Naples symphony orchestras, among others. Lee’s discography as a Naxos artist spans the works of Scarlatti, Liszt, Scriabin, and Clementi, and her eco-awareness album Re!nvented, on the E1 label, garnered her the Classical Recording Foundation’s young artist of the year award. She has commissioned works by prominent composers and has given world premieres of works written by Frederic Rzewski, Paola Prestini, Marc-André Hamelin, Alexander Goehr, Gabriela Lena Frank, Texu Kim, and Huang Ruo.

A laureate of the Santander International Piano Competition and the Cleveland International Piano Competition, Lee is a graduate of Juilliard and earned her doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her major mentors and teachers have been Richard Goode, Julian Martin, Robert McDonald, Jerome Lowenthal, and Ursula Oppens.

Prior to Juilliard, she was an associate professor at the Cincinnati-College Conservatory of Music, where she received the university’s highest honor in teaching, 2021 University of Cincinnati A.B. “Dolly” Cohen Award for excellence in teaching. During the summers, she serves on the piano faculty of the Bowdoin International Music Festival.