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).
Ham has won top prizes at numerous piano competitions, including 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 in Merkin Hall as “an admirable piano recital." The German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau has written, “Jeongwon Ham possessed astonishing and effortless technique. She plays not only with incredible warmth but also with great power.”
As a soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician, Ham has given numerous concerts, master classes, and lectures at many universities, festivals, and conferences in the U.S. Asia, and Europe. In addition, she was featured at the “40 faces-40 years” exhibition at the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung's 40th-anniversary convention in Potsdam-Babelsberg in Germany. The Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung (A scholarship program sponsored by the Free Democratic Party in Germany) selected the forty most successful people out of 6,800 scholarship recipients worldwide for the special event.
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.
As a highly sought-after adjudicator, Ham has served at many international and national piano competitions including the Bartók/Kabalevsky/Prokofiev International Piano Competition, World Piano Conference, Classical American International Piano Competition, Asian International Piano Academy and Festival, Sonatina and Sonata International Youth Piano Competition, and Starr Young Artist National Piano Competition. Ham is frequently invited to judge MTNA (Music Teachers National Association) piano competitions at state, divisional, and national levels.
She has held teaching positions in Germany, Korea, China, and the US. In Germany, she taught at the Hochschule für Musik Hans-Eisler(Berlin), the Carl Phillip Emmanuel 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. In addition, she held a guest professor position at the Graduate College of Performing Arts of the 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 the Renmin University of China in Beijing, China.
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.
- Künstlerische Abschlußprüfung - Folkwang Hochschule für Musik, Essen, Germany
- Konzertexamen - Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, Germany
- DMA (Piano Performance) - University of Kansas
