Helen Sung

Education

She attended Houston"s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and went on to receive undergraduate and master"s degrees in classical piano performance at the University of Texas at Austin.

Career

Sung is a native of Houston, Texas. Her musical life began with classical piano and violin. She first heard jazz music during that time and eventually switched her focus.

She went on to graduate from Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance.

Highlights of the two-year program include performing at the Kennedy Center and touring India and Thailand with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. She has five albums to her cr, including a 2011 debut Civil Defense on Steeplechase Records: (re)Conception and a 2nd Civil Defense (a live recording) on Sunnyside Records: Going Express.

Her Sunnyside debut Sungbird After Albeniz was a jazz-classical project Helenistique (her sophomore release on Fresh Sound Records) was praised by the JazzTimes as "one of the year"s most exciting listens".

Sung"s latest album is her 2014 debut on Concord Records, entitled Anthem for a New Day.

Sung appeared on Marian McPartland"s National Public Radio Piano Jazz program, and appeared at the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Detroit International Jazz Festival, the Aspen Institute Ideas Festival, Seattle"s Earshot Festival, the Kennedy Center"s Mary Lou Williams Festival. She has worked with notable jazz artists including Clark Terry, Slide Hampton, Ron Carter, Jon Faddis, Wayne Shorter, T.S.Monk, MacArthur Fellow Regina Carter, and Terri Lyne Carrington (Sung performed on Carrington"s Grammy-winning Mosaic Project Civil Defense). She has completed composition commissions for the West Chester University Poetry Conference, arts organization JazzReach, the artisanal North Coast Brewing Company, and was selected as a 2010 New York City Spaces/Con Edison Composer-in-Residence at Flushing Town Hall.

2010 NYCSpaces/Con Edison Composer-in-Residence at Flushing Town Hall 2010 Artist Presenter and Panelist at Aspen Ideas Festival 2009 United States. State Department-Rhythm Road "American Music Abroad" Ensemble.

Achievements

• Now based in New York City, Sung won the 2007 Kennedy Center"s Mary Lou Williams Jazz Piano Competition and was a semifinalist in the 1999 Monk Institute Piano Competition. 2014 Winner of Chamber Music America"s New Jazz Works Grant 2014 Winner of Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation USArtists International Grant 2007 Winner of Kennedy Center"s Mary Lou Williams Competition 2006 Winner of Chamber Music America/Doris Duke Foundation residency grant.