Korean conductor Eun Sun Kim is the Caroline H. Hume Music Director of San Francisco Opera, a position she has held since 2021. The 2024-25 season has seen Kim make her highly successful debut at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden with Tosca and return to the Berlin State Opera to lead Simon Boccanegra. At San Francisco Opera this season, she continues her long-term exploration of the works of Verdi and Wagner with new productions of Un ballo in maschera, Tristan und Isolde and Idomeneo. On the concert stage this season, she returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and makes her debut appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla, and the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano.

Some of Kim’s notable orchestral engagements to date include the Berlin Philharmonic, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre National de France, Philharmonia Orchestra London, Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona i Nacional de Catalunya, Seoul Philharmonic, and major North American orchestras such as the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, Toronto Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Her collaboration with the National Brass Ensemble—featuring a new arrangement of Wagner’s Ring cycle—was released by Pentatone on the album Deified.

Kim appears regularly at many of the world’s leading opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, the Wiener Staatsoper, the Bayerische Staatsoper, Semperoper Dresden, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Opéra national de Paris, and Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

Eun Sun Kim studied composition and conducting in her hometown of Seoul, South Korea, before continuing her studies in Stuttgart. Immediately after graduation, she won first prize at the International Jesús López Cobos Opera Conducting Competition at Teatro Real in Madrid.