Dr. Kwang-Wu Kim is an outspoken advocate for the arts and a proponent of the need to expand the role of creative practice in society and to rethink the way that artists are educated. He assumed the role of dean of the Herberger College of the Arts at Arizona State University in August 2006; in May, 2009 he was named dean and director of the new Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts which unites all of the university's arts, design, and architectural disciplines. In this role, he oversees a faculty and staff of 500, serving over 6,000 students.

Dr. Kim holds a doctor of musical arts degree from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University where he was a student of legendary pianist Leon Fleisher and where he served for eight years as Fleisher's teaching associate. He received his bachelor's degree in philosophy, magna cum laude, from Yale University. Prior to his arrival in Arizona, Dr. Kim served as president of the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Formerly artistic and administrative director of El Paso Pro-Musica and co-founder of the El Paso Chamber Music Festival, he is a Professor of Music at Arizona State University and has held teaching positions at the Longy School of Music, the University of Texas at El Paso, the Peabody Institute, and Dickinson College.

A guest speaker at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, he has been an invited panelist for the National Association of Schools of Music and a juror at the New England Conservatory, the Boston Conservatory, and the Boston Arts Academy. Dr. Kim has been guest faculty at the St. Lawrence String Quartet Chamber Music Seminar at Stanford University, the Rotterdam Conservatory of Music, the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and at the Banff Centre for the Arts. As a pianist, he made his solo debut at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, his orchestral debut with the Milwaukee symphony orchestra under the baton of Lukas Foss, and was presented at the Marlboro Music Festival by then artistic director Rudolf Serkin.