JK, born and raised in South Korea, has been a dance/performing artist and arts educator for 25 years. He is trained in Korean martial arts and traditional dance/ritual, which strongly inform his aesthetic and artistic vision. He describes his practice as “a dynamic dialogue between my training and background in South Korean traditional dance and music and my embrace of western improvisation, especially Contact Improvisation, as a performance medium.” His performance work and workshops embody aesthetic traditions of Korean Shamanism, as well as Deep Listening studies with musician/composer Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016), immersive strategies of visual artists such as Ann Hamilton and William Kentridge, and lessons from his collaborations with site-specific and post-modern choreographers. He has designed and led CI workshops for CI centers and festivals, including Earthdance and Atland (Massachusetts, USA), Freiberg Festival (Germany) and in Bogota, Colombia, Oaxaca, Mexico, Chiangmai, Thailand and Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has also taught his distinctive approach to improvisation at numerous universities and independent dance education programs in the U.S., Europe and South Korea. Since 2014 he’s been an artist-in-residence at Asian Arts Initiative (AAI) in Philadelphia PA, where a Knight Foundation grant supported several of his performance works. He was awarded a 2015 multi-year grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage to create SaltSoul, a multi-disciplinary research/creative/performance project which addressed, in part, the Sewol Ferry disaster. He was nominated in 2017 and 2020 for a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and received a 2017 Bilateral Dance Artist Exchange Residency in Budapest, Hungary through Philadelphia Dance Projects. In 2021 he was awarded a project grant from the Public Art Program of the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation to create Gather Together in Their Name, a year-long public art project in collaboration with 3 community-based arts/social service organizations. Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater and its HotHouse repertory company have embraced he as a movement consultant for their stage productions and a regular trainer for their theater artists. Most recently, his work has focused on how movement and voice are pathways to finding a sense of “home” and belonging at a time of increasing migration, displacement, hostility toward immigrants, and human isolation.