Pianist Joyce Yang has played music from Domenico Scarlatti to Aaron Jay Kernis as a soloist and chamber player. Her international breakthrough came when she won a silver medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2005. Yang was born in Seoul on April 4, 1986. She began piano lessons with an aunt at age four and made quick progress, winning national competitions in South Korea over the next several years. When Yang was nine, she and her mother traveled to New York, where she was heard by teacher Yoheved Kaplinsky at the Juilliard School. She enrolled at the Music School of the Korea National University of the Arts at ten, studying with Choong Mo Kang. Yang moved to the U.S. in 1997 and entered Juilliard's pre-college program, studying with Kaplinsky and attended Ward Melville High School in East Setauket, New York, on Long Island. While still a 19-year-old student, Yang won the silver medal at the Van Cliburn Competition, going on to a U.S. tour in 2007 and 2008, performing with the New York Philharmonic, the National Symphony, and the Phoenix Symphony. She continued to study at Juilliard until graduating in 2010 with the school's Arthur Rubinstein Prize and William A. Petschek Piano Recital Award. She also received the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2010. Yang has gone on to perform domestically and internationally with the Chicago Symphony, the BBC Philharmonic, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, among many other prominent groups, in all, making more than 1,000 debuts and re-engagements by 2020. Over five years, she performed a cycle of Rachmaninov's piano concertos with the Milwaukee Symphony under conductor Edo de Waart. Yang is a frequent guest at festivals, including the Aspen Summer Music Festival, La Jolla SummerFest, and the Seattle Chamber Music Society. As a chamber player, she has collaborated with the likes of the Takács Quartet at Lincoln Center's Great Performers series, the Emerson String Quartet at the Mostly Mozart Festival, and the Alexander String Quartet on an ongoing basis. She has begun exploring ways to bring classical music to new audiences, serving as the guest artistic director at the Laguna Beach Music Festival in California, where she led outreach to young audiences, curating and performing concerts that explored the relationship between music and dance. In 2020, she performed the world premiere of Kernis' Un Bacio from her home, online, during the coronavirus pandemic. Yang's recording career began with her performances at the Van Cliburn Competition, which were also featured in a documentary called In the Heart of Music. She has recorded for the Avie, Foghorn Classics, and Albany labels, issuing the world premiere recording of Michael Torke's Three Manhattan Bridges on the latter label in 2016. In 2020, she moved to Reference Recordings for the world premiere of Jonathan Leshnoff's Piano Concerto with the Kansas City Symphony under Michael Stern.