Columbia College Chicago has appointed a Korean-American as its president.

According to the Chicago Tribune on Wednesday, Columbia’s board of trustees has named Kim Kwang-wu, a professor of music and the dean of design and arts school of Arizona State University, its 10th president and chief executive officer.

Established in 1890, Columbia College Chicago is one of the largest private colleges of the arts in the U.S. It has about 11,000 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate courses. 

Kim, 54, will take the helm of the 123-year-old institution in July after President Warrick Carter retires.

Kim, a pianist, received a doctorate in musical arts from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, magna cum laude, from Yale University. He is currently dean and director of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and a music professor at Arizona State University. Before working at Arizona State, Kim was president of the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As a pianist, he made his solo debut with a piano concert at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and his orchestral debut with the Milwaukee symphony orchestra.

Kim was born and raised in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.

By Chun Sung-woo (swchun@heraldcorp.com)