Dr. Hajin Kim, an active pianist, currently serves as an Adjunct Piano Professor at Grand Rapids Community College and a faculty member at Michigan State University’s Community Music School. She works as a piano faculty member every summer at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp And previously served as a piano faculty member at Siena Heights University. She earned her Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in piano performance at Michigan State University, where she also earned her second Master of Music (MM) degree in piano pedagogy. She earned her first Master of Music (MM) degree in piano performance at Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea, and her Bachelor of Music (BM) degree in piano performance at Boston Conservatory.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Dr. Kim began her piano studies when she was four years old. She won first place at the Yook-Young National Piano Competition, one of Seoul’s top competitions, when she was six years old and, when she was eleven, won first place at the Seoul National Music Competition in South Korea. She has performed at multiple venues, including a piano solo recital at Weill Hall in Carnegie Hall, New York; Todi, Italy; Seoul, Korea; and various cities in the US, including Boston, St. John, East Lansing, Lansing, and Twin Lake. Dr. Kim’s dedication and commitment have helped ensure her students’ elevated performance, as evidenced at select competition awards, such as the Capital Area of Michigan Music Teachers Association (CAMTA) of the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) in East Lansing, Michigan. She has also served as an adjudicator for music competitions with the Michigan PTA Reflections Arts Program since 2019.
Based on her successfully proven piano pedagogy curriculum for the class piano for all levels, she published two piano textbooks. Piano Master for Everyone Level I received excellent reviews from Kirkus Reviews, one of the top critics for new publications in New York:
- “Readers will be pleasantly surprised at how quickly they’re able to try their hands at classic compositions”
- “…covering exactly what the reader needs to know, and not a sentence more”
- “aspiring players seeking to teach themselves directly from the page couldn’t find more straightforward instruction”
–Kirkus Reviews in New York
Piano Master for Everyone Level I was also recently requested for inclusion in the 66th anniversary publication with selected bestsellers by Souvenir Press in the United Kingdom.
Dr. Kim’s second publication, Piano Master for Everyone Level II was included in the top 5% of the best books published in 2022 by Outskirts Press and earned a bronze prize (third place) in the Academic/Educational category of the EVVY Awards, an international independent publishing award supported by the Colorado Independent Publishers Association (CIPA), in 2023.
