Yujin Kim

Biography

An artist shaped by two continents, Yujin Kim was born on 13 March 2001 amid the coastal breezes of South Korea. She first tasted ballet’s vocabulary at Seoul’s Ecole de HB, learning to spin tendus into lines as delicate as calligraphy strokes. In 2015 her quest for refinement drew her to Europe, to Munich’s University of Music and Performing Arts, where under Natálie Hoffmann and Boyana Nenadovich she forged a technique as gleaming as Bavarian crystal and as pliant as spring willow. For three consecutive years the German Stage Association honoured her with scholarships, a laurel she wore lightly but gratefully.

Still a teenager, Yujin unveiled her own Giselle, pouring both fragility and unearthly fervour into the white tulle; soon Clara’s Christmas wonder, Chun Hyang’s Korean lyricism and Nikia’s fatal devotion followed. These portraits matured during seasons with the Lee Won-kook Ballet Company (2015–2016) and, more prominently, with Universal Ballet Korea, where she polished principal and solo roles of the grand classical canon while lending her artistry to newly minted Korean creations.

When she first crossed the threshold of Prague’s National Theatre in August 2024, the gilded auditorium seemed to echo her own sense of anticipation. Within weeks she flared across the stage in the Spanish Dance of The Nutcracker – A Christmas Carol, breathed rose-tinted life into Rosaline in Romeo and Juliet and knelt in luminous serenity for the Prayer solo of Coppélia. On the experimental side she infused Eyal Dadon’s Artza and Mário Radačovský’s Bohemian Gravity with silk-thread precision and youthful daring. Thus Prague discovered a ballerina able to glide from crystalline classicism to the prismatic rhythms of the present day, always carrying within her the quiet, steady glow of a Korean lantern.