Ji-Hyun

Ji-Hyun was born Ji-Hyun Jung in Busan, South Korea, as the first-born to her mother, Jung-Sook Yi (née Chun), who was a travel agent, and her estranged father who stepped out of the picture when Ji-Hyun was 4 years old. Due to the cultural hardship of divorce in South Korea, her mother soon remarried and immigrated the family to Grandville, Michigan in 1997. Ji-Hyun has one half-sister, Jung-Min Yi, who was born in the States in 1999. Ji-Hyun attended Grandville High School of Grandville, Michigan, where was voted the homecoming queen and class president. She went on to study communications and fine art at Hope College. Ji-Hyun met her husband, Corey Haverda, while serving in a non-profit organization in Oregon in the fall of 2013 and they held a small wedding ceremony in Warda, Texas, on January 2, 2015.

In 2019, Ji-Hyun attended her first acting class in Portland, Oregon, at the Rooney/Totman Acting Studio at the age of 27 after she underwent a double fasciotomy operation for a rare condition known as Chronic Exertional Compartment Syndrome. She claims it was this series of surgeries followed by medical complications and being in a prolonged state of immobility that gave her the imminence to fully commit to the creative work she had secretly yearned for instead of continuing a more traditional pursuit aligned by her cultural roots. Ji-Hyun landed her first role in a feature film within the same year.