She bridges the original taste of cacao learned in Guatemala with the agricultural character of Jeju. The day her handmade chocolates and caramels sold out at Bellong Market, the intention to capture the essence of food in her products became unmistakable. Together with local merchants, she leads “Craft in Sehwa,” recording and expanding the village’s craftsmanship and culture in fresh ways. Through fair trade, she keeps practicing the value of connection, linking Korea and Guatemala, one family to another. Drawing on the care learned from raising five children, she hopes Jeju becomes a place where the next generation can grow their dreams, and she continues to build her brand with that belief.

Boo Hyemi grew up in a home where work songs and folk melodies were part of everyday life, making her path into Jeju’s traditional singing a natural one. Through the unique rhythms of Jeju’s work songs, she conveys the daily lives of women and the emotional landscape of the island. She is active with the Jeju Traditional Folk Song Preservation Association, the Hana Art Korean Traditional Performing Arts Group, and the Jeju Work Song Permanent Performance Team, bringing performances to schools and villages where audiences join her in simple refrains and gestures. By sharing the stories and emotions behind songs like “Eodo Sana” and “Manggeun Sori,” she offers encounters that feel closer to lived experience than passive listening. Recently, she has been exploring short-form videos and modern creative approaches to open Jeju’s sound to broader audiences. Looking ahead, she hopes to form a children’s folk ensemble in Jeju and create new songs that people everywhere can hum and carry with them.

She is a founder who connects scattered moments of “useful time” in the city, linking people with the spaces they need. Through SpaceCloud, Korea’s leading shared-space platform, she has enabled tens of thousands of places across the country to be used by the hour, turning the idea of a lighter, more accessible city into reality. Her starting point was the difficulty of finding meeting rooms during her first job, and today she works between Seoul and Jeju, collaborating with local partners while growing the value of spaces with her team. What began as a small experiment connecting a dozen friends’ spaces has expanded into a platform that now reaches the UK, helping users find the right place at the right moment, and helping hosts make use of unused time. She often describes space as “a business of selling time,” and continues to build fair, flexible access through technology. Looking ahead, she hopes to shape community-living projects in Jeju—places that embody a way of living together—and imagines the island becoming a destination for social developers from around the world. Moving between work and life, between local and global, she keeps designing spaces that grow more alive the more people use them.