Park Ji-hyo

Park Ji-hyo (Korean: 박지효; Hanja: 朴志效; born Park Ji-soo on February 1, 1997), known mononymously as Jihyo (Korean: 지효), is a South Korean singer. She is the leader of the K-pop girl group Twice under JYP Entertainment.

Jihyo was born on February 1, 1997 in Guri, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea. Her birth name was Park Ji-soo.

Debut and solo activites

JYP Entertainment had scouted Jihyo after she participated in a contest on Junior Naver and placed second. She then joined JYP Entertainment as a trainee at the age of eight and trained for ten years before her debut. During her trainee years, Jihyo was known as the face of Innisfree's teen line with boy band Boyfriend. She trained with many JYP idols including Wonder Girls' Sunmi and Hyerim, Bae Suzy, Jo Kwon, and Nichkhun. Jihyo was set to debut in a girl group along with Nayeon, Jeongyeon and Sana, but the project was cancelled. Instead, they all joined the reality television show Sixteen, a competition designed to select the founding members of Twice. She legally changed her name to Jihyo before the competition. As one of nine successful participants, she went on to join the newly formed girl group Twice. Though not the oldest member of the group, Jihyo was later voted by her bandmates as their leader in an anonymous vote. In October 2015, Twice officially debuted with the release of their first mini-album, The Story Begins, with the lead single "Like Ooh-Ahh" being the first K-pop debut song to reach 100 million views on YouTube.

In August 2019, the agencies representing Jihyo and Kang Daniel, a former member of Wanna One, confirmed that they are dating. After the news broke, Jihyo and Kang topped Twitter's trends list in the Philippines. They were described as a new "power couple" of K-pop by the media.

Collaborations

Songwriting credits