Helen Sung

Helen Sung is an acclaimed jazz pianist and composer and a Guggenheim Fellow. A native of Houston, Texas, and alumna of its High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, she diverged from her classical upbringing after encountering jazz during undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Helen went on to be part of the inaugural class of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance (renamed the Herbie Hancock Institute in 2019) and win the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Jazz Piano Competition. In addition to her band and album projects, Helen has performed and toured with such luminaries as Clark Terry, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra, Regina Carter, Terri Lyne Carrington, Cecile McLorin Salvant, and the Mingus Big Band. 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.