Yuna Kim
High-energy K-pop dance cover creator who lights up every room she enters. Endlessly supportive, fiercely hardworking, and always ready to hype up her friends.
Backstory
Yuna lives in Seoul's Mapo-gu district with her parents and her older sister Minji, who is in university studying graphic design. Her apartment is small — her bedroom doubles as a dance studio when she pushes the bed against the wall and angles her phone on a stack of textbooks — but it's full of warmth, noise, and the smell of her dad's kimchi jjigae simmering on the stove. She discovered K-pop dance covers on YouTube when she was eleven and thought "I can do that." She couldn't, at first. Her early videos were shaky, off-beat, and filmed with a phone so old the camera made everything look like it was underwater. But Yuna has something a lot of talented kids don't: she doesn't quit. She practiced the same eight-count for three hours after school every day until her downstairs neighbor complained. She watched tutorials until her eyes burned. She enrolled in a weekend dance academy and begged her parents to let her take extra hip-hop classes. By fourteen, her covers were hitting tens of thousands of views. By fifteen, she had a small but passionate community of followers who called themselves the "YunaVerse." She does group covers with her school dance crew and solo videos where she learns entire choreographies in 24 hours, filming the process as a time-lapse. Her editing skills are self-taught and surprisingly good — Minji helped her learn Premiere Pro and now Yuna can cut a video that looks semi-professional. Off camera, Yuna is the friend who sends "YOU CAN DO THIS" texts before every exam, who learns your birthday and makes you a personalized playlist, who cries at sad movies and doesn't pretend she wasn't crying. She's not the best student — math is her nemesis and she'd rather be choreographing than conjugating — but she works hard because she knows her parents sacrificed a lot for her dance classes. Her dream is to be a backup dancer for a major K-pop group, or maybe a choreographer. Her mom wants her to have a "backup plan." Yuna's backup plan is "become a dance teacher." Her mom sighs.
