Dr. Jeongwon Ham is Frieda Derdeyn Bambas Professor of Piano in Music at the University of Oklahoma. She has received many teaching and performance awards and recognitions, including the Regent's Award for Superior Teaching (2021).  

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Her students frequently distinguish themselves as winners at many regional, national, and international competitions, and hold faculty positions at major universities and colleges in the US, Canada, and Asia. Some of the recent examples are the University of Alabama, Bowling Green State University, University of Houston, Los Angeles Harbor College, University of Northern Iowa, Northern Michigan University, University of Missouri-Columbia, University of South Carolina, Oklahoma City University, Chinju National University of Education, and Ewha Womens' University, and the Korea National University of Arts. 

 

Ham has won top prizes at numerous piano competitions, including the Bartók/Kabalevsky International Competition, the Epinal International Competition, the Paul Hindemith Competition, the Artur Schnabel Competition, and the Simone Belsky Competition. The New York Concert Review referred to her recital at Merkin Hall as “an admirable piano recital." The German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau remarked, “Jeongwon Ham possessed astonishing and effortless technique. She plays not only with incredible warmth but also with great power.”

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As a soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician, Ham has given numerous concerts, master classes, and lectures at many universities, festivals, and conferences across the U.S. Asia, and Europe, including the Classical Music Festival in Eisenstadt, Austria; the Festival Internazionale Incontri Musicali di Sorrento, Italy; World Piano Conference, Serbia; Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities; Korean Piano Pedagogy Conference, Seoul; and Asian International Piano Academy Festival and Competition. Recent performances and lectures include the Lindlar Piano Festival in Germany, a guest residency at Northern Michigan University, and a tour in the California area. 

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Ham was showcased in the “40 Faces-40 Years” exhibition during the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung's 40th-anniversary convention in Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany. The Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung (a scholarship program sponsored by the Free Democratic Party in Germany) selected the forty most distinguished individuals from a pool of 6,800 scholarship recipients worldwide for this special event. 

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As a highly sought-after adjudicator, Ham has served at many international and national piano competitions, such as the Bartók/Kabalevsky/Prokofiev International Piano Competition, the Los Angeles Liszt International Piano Competition, the World Piano Conference, the Classical American International Piano Competition, the Asian International Piano Academy and Festival, the Sonatina and Sonata International Youth Piano Competition, and the Starr Young Artist National Piano Competition. Ham is frequently invited to judge MTNA (Music Teachers National Association) piano competitions at the state, divisional, and national levels.  ​

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She has held teaching positions in Germany, Korea, China, and the U.S. In Germany, she taught at the Hochschule für Musik Hans-Eisler (Berlin), the Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Music Pre-College (Berlin), and the University of Duisburg (Duisburg). Since 2014, Ham has been a faculty member at the annual International Piano Festival in Lindlar, Germany. Additionally, she held a guest professorship at the Graduate College of Performing Arts at Ewha Women’s University in Korea, served as a guest master teacher at the Xinghai Conservatory of Music in Guangzhou, and was an Artist-in-Residence at Renmin University of China in Beijing. 

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Jeongwon Ham obtained piano performance degrees from the United States (Doctor of Musical Arts, University of Kansas) and Germany (Konzertexamen, Universität der Künste, Berlin; Reifeprüfung, Folkwang Hochschule, Essen).  Her principal teachers were Professors Sequeira Costa, Klaus Hellwig, Hans Leygraf, and Ludger Maxsein.  She also studied with Edith Picht-Axenfeld, Claude Frank, Karl Heinz Kämmerling, Alfons Kontarsky, Vitaly Margulis, and Gyögy Sebok at several International Piano Academies.  

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