2025 Composition Contest – Results

The winner of SWOJO’s 9th Annual Jazz Composition Contest for Women Composers has been selected.

 

Winner:  Rin Seo “Desert Flower”

Rin Seo is a Korean composer, conductor and pianist based in New York City. Raised in a rich musical environment encompassing Western classical, jazz, theater, and Korean folk music, Seo creates genre-defying works that blend eclectic idioms with a distinctive voice and inventive spirit.

She holds a Bachelor of Music in Classical Composition from the Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea. Driven by a passion to expand her sonic spectrum, she moved to the United States to study jazz performance and composition at the Berklee College of Music, where she was awarded a scholarship and earned a Professional Diploma. Seo further refined her craft, studying with Grammy Award-winning composer Jim McNeely during her Master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music.

Seo’s notable awards and honors include ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award(2020), DownBeat magazine Student Music Award (2020), and BMI Booker Scholarship for young jazz artists (2019). Additionally, she received numerous grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Korean Cultural Center New York, and the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture.

Her music has been featured at prominent venues including Dizzy’s Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Jazz Gallery, and The Jarasum Jazz Festival in Korea, among others.

 

This project is supported in part by 4Culture and the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs.