Biography.

In her twenty-fifth year of collegiate teaching, violinist Soh-Hyun Park Altino (박소현) continues to find great joy and inspiration in mentoring her students as they develop their own voice and expression. Her experiences with playing-related injuries fuel her passion to help and support string musicians and educators in their search for greater freedom while playing their instruments.

Native of Korea, Soh-Hyun grew up around music educators: pianist mother, mezzo soprano grandmother, and a renowed composer grandfather, La Un-Yung. At age sixteen, she came to the U.S. and studied in the preparatory program of the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins, where enthusiasm for chamber music and music theory was instilled in her. She completed her Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in violin performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music under the teaching and guidance of Donald Weilerstein, for whom she was a teaching assistant. She has since performed solo and chamber music and taught in music festivals and master classes around the world.

Soh-Hyun taught violin and chamber music at the University of Memphis for fourteen years prior to serving on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she received the 2018 Certain-Sandefur Distinguished Teaching Award and the Vilas Associates research award.

In 2019 Soh-Hyun began a new study of interpreting traditional Korean music on the Western violin. Her research has been funded by grants from Wheaton College, UW-Madison, the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), and the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS) in Korea. In the fall of 2023, she presented a series of lectures across the U.S. and performed world premieres of the full Kim Ilgu school of ajaeng sanjo on the violin, and in August of 2025, she was invited to perform the same sanjo at the prestigious Jeonju International Sori Festival in Korea. Her endeavor has been applauded as a process of “embodying the core spirit of the genre” and as “setting a new milestone in the history of Korean music.” On a personal level, her study of the traditional music has brought her back to her native culture, language, and people, and she is deeply grateful for the composers, performers, and scholars who have persisted in preserving traditional Korean music.

She began teaching in the Conservatory of Music at Wheaton College in Illinois in 2021 and was a recipient of the 2025-2026 Senior Teaching Achievement Award. Soh-Hyun, her husband and cellist Leonardo, and their son David, live in Wheaton, where they are part of Life Church.