Helen Sung is an acclaimed jazz pianist and composer and a Guggenheim Fellow. A graduate of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance (renamed the Herbie Hancock Institute in 2019), she won the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Jazz Piano Competition and has performed and toured with such luminaries as Clark Terry, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Regina Carter, Terri Lyne Carrington, Cecile McLorin Salvant, and the Mingus Big Band. In addition to her band, activities of note include her large ensemble project “Oracles”; a digital streaming series “Re-Orientation: Asian American Artists Out Loud” (made possible by a Chamber Music America Digital Residency grant); and partnering with the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, the Zuckerman Institute’s Public Programs Department, and Arts & Minds to present programs examining the neuroscience behind making/hearing music to engage those living with Alzheimer’s and other dementias. She is currently visiting faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and an Associate Professor at Columbia University, where she also was the inaugural jazz artist-in-residence at its Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute exploring analogies between jazz and neuroscience. A Steinway artist, “Sung plays with crisp swing and elegant invention, her rhythms drawing from the music’s deepest blues roots – and setting listeners’ heads bobbing – while she explores her own fresh ideas, often inspired from her classical training.” (New York Times)