Park Ji-won

Who is Park Ji-won?

Park Ji-won (박지원) is a member of fromis_9. The group debuted as nine on 24 January 2018 with the mini album To. Heart, and five members signed with the newly founded ASND in 2025 and resumed under the same name.

Two survival shows stand between her and that debut. At the debut showcase on 24 January 2018, BizEnter reported, she said she had gone from SIXTEEN to Idol School and reached her debut that way. Star News wrote the same day that she had been a trainee at JYP Entertainment, and quoted her saying that the long trainee years had held hard times but that she was glad to have met these members. The second of those shows, Mnet’s Idol School, settled its nine-member debut line-up on the final broadcast of 29 September 2017, and Kyeongin Ilbo named Park Ji-won among them the next day.

Her name is on the album credits too. TenAsia published the track list of the second full-length album Glow ME on 8 July 2026 and wrote that all five members are credited for writing and composing across the record, and that the eighth track, ‘Why do I cry?’, is sung by Song Ha-young and Park Ji-won. In a written interview published by Star News the day before release, on 20 July 2026, she named ‘Teacher’, which she wrote and composed on, as the track she is fondest of: it is her first go at afrobeats, she said, and a style she had wanted to try, which makes it mean more. In the same interview she described Glow ME as an album about finding one’s brightest self through new meetings and new experiences, and through the hurt and the growth along the way.

The year she became a musical actor

Star News reported on 28 April 2026 that she had been cast as Ali in the musical Hell’s Kitchen, drawn from the music and life of Alicia Keys and set in the Manhattan neighbourhood of the title, where a girl grows up and finds her own voice. Bridge Economy wrote the same day that the show had taken 13 Tony nominations after its Broadway opening in 2024 and won the 2025 Grammy for best musical theater album, and that Ali is played in turn by Park Ji-won, Son Seung-yeon and Kim Su-ha.

Her first performance was at the GS Art Center in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, on 28 July 2026. The Korean premiere had opened four days earlier, on 24 July, and the run goes to 8 November. TenAsia reported that she became a musical actor with that performance, and carried what she said through ASND: standing on a musical stage for the first time since her debut left her nervous but more excited than nervous, and she had prepared hard to carry Ali’s story to the audience honestly.

She had talked about that preparation shortly before her first performance. MyDaily reported on 23 July 2026, from a Cosmopolitan shoot and interview, that she had found it hard at first to inhabit Ali completely, this being her first musical, and that on senior actors’ advice she kept a diary in the character’s voice until she could see what her own childhood and Ali’s had in common — a thirst for music, a longing for freedom. The number she is most attached to is ‘No One’, which she said she used to practise alone at the piano during her trainee years.

What to watch

‘Teacher’, which she wrote and composed on, and ‘Why do I cry?’, which she sings with Song Ha-young, are a good place to start on Glow ME. Official music videos and the group’s self-produced content are on the fromis_9 YouTube channel, and K-Culture Radar links to official uploads rather than rehosting them.