Pianist and composer Helen Sung hails from Houston, Texas, and is an alumna of its celebrated High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. After a jazz epiphany during undergraduate studies in classical piano at the University of Texas at Austin, she went on to become part of the inaugural class of the Thelonious Monk Institute (now the Herbie Hancock Institute) of Jazz Performance, win the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Jazz Piano Competition, and receive prizes including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Claudette Sorel Award from the National Arts Club.

In addition to leading her own band, Helen has performed 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. Now based in New York City, she is 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. 

With ten leader albums to her credit, her latest release Oracles (Sunnyside Records, 2026) is a big band project featuring musical portraits of jazz legends who mentored her at the Monk Institute (one of her compositions “Wayne’s World,” won the 2022 BMI Charlie Parker Jazz Composition). Other activities of note including 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 about the neuroscience behind making/hearing music to engage those living with Alzheimer’s and other dementias. 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)