Born in Dae-gu in South Korea, Hyo Joo studied piano at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris with Theodor Paraskivesco, Jacques Rouvier and Itamar Golan for music chamber. She also studied under Françoise Thinat at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, and then with Matti Raekallio at the University for Music and Performing Arts of Hannover.
She has been winning competitions since the age of 13, including First Prize in the Cincinnatti World Piano Competition, followed by another First Prize in the Young Chopin Competition in Moscow. In 2003, she was a gold medallist at the Piano Campus Competition in Pontoise, and in 2007 she earned Second Prize in the Epinal Competition.
She regularly gives recitals in Italy, Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, France and Japan, and performs in Korea with the finest national orchestras.
In 2012 Hyo Joo won the “Coup de Coeur Breguet” award at the Geneva International Music Competition. The jury awarded South Korea’s Hyo Joo Lee a second prize worth 12,000 francs for her playing of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto in C minor. But Lee, 25, delighted the public more with her sensitive but masterly rendition of one of the great works of late Romanticism, and she took the audience prize voted on by the public in the hall as well as winning a contract to record this portrait CD with orchestra sponsored by Swiss watchmaker Breguet, part of the Swatch Group.