When Sujin Nam was a teenager in Seoul studying classical piano, she stumbled one evening upon a live jazz club in Itaewon, a neighborhood largely catering to the nearby U.S. military base. The pianist, Lee Young Jung, was playing with American jazz musicians.

“I have a very good ear and when I listen to music I know how the harmony goes,” recalls Nam in her soft, carefully enunciated speech. “When I heard jazz for the first time, I was totally thrown off. I couldn’t follow it.”

Nam was intrigued. The eldest daughter in a family full of musicians and music teachers, she had never before been exposed to jazz. When she realized that Lee was improvising she was hooked. Korea’s jazz scene at the time was scant, and Nam could not find formal instruction anywhere. She convinced Lee to give her lessons.

Ultimately, she decided to move to New York from Seoul to attend Mannes College of Music and then later the University of North Texas, where she studied jazz performance, arranging, classical piano performance, conducting and composition. Determined to find a place where she could pursue all her varied musical interests, she left for Hollywood and the University of Southern California’s film music program, where she felt her options would be the most broad.

After graduating, she was taken under the wing of Christopher Young, a USC instructor and Golden Globe-nominated film composer. She has since worked with him many times, starting off as his score coordinator on the Sean Connery film “Entrapment.”

“She’s the hardest working woman I’ve ever met,” says Young about his protégé who won a Sundance composer fellowship in 2002. “And she’s an incredibly talented, brilliant composer.

“Her experience in the world of jazz improvising, gave her a unique take on movies and film scoring.”

The composing business was, however, a competitive scene dominated by white males. Nam often felt the need to omit any soft, love-themed music from her demo tapes, instead packing them with aggressive action or horror-oriented tunes.

“I was thinking,” says Nam, “I have to be totally masculine.”

After attending a 2003 conductor’s workshop led by Lucas Richman, the conductor for the film scores of “The Manchurian Candidate” and “As Good As It Gets,” she and the other five male participants chose a song to conduct. Out of the songs available, she again chose a challenging, action-cue piece from “Chain Reaction” rather than a softer and simpler Mozart number.

Although Richman called her performance “very good,” he was not impressed. “You have to bring out who you are,” he told Nam.

He said any of the other five men in the workshop could have done the “Chain Reaction” piece just as well as she, but only she had the musicality to make the Mozart piece stand out.

“Everyone thought Mozart was too simple, too easy,” says Nam. “I was not thinking [about] the delicate and elegant part of Mozart.