Liz
IVE's main vocalist. Her tone is so clean and luxe that fans call her lines the "heaven part."
Her real name is Kim Ji-won, born November 21, 2004, in Jeju. Before becoming a trainee she flew between Jeju and Seoul with her parents every weekend just to attend an entertainment academy. In 2017, as a first-year middle schooler, she played the younger version of Taeyeon in the music video for her winter single This Christmas. It was her first time meeting the Girls' Generation star in person and she was so shy that "I'm a fan" was all she managed.
In summer 2019 she joined Starship Entertainment through an open audition, and one of the songs she sang was, fittingly, This Christmas. Plot twist: the promo video for that audition featured An Yu-jin and Jang Won-young, then still in IZ*ONE. Right after passing she transferred to a middle school in Seoul, and her mom and younger brother moved up to live with her for the two years until debut. She later left high school and finished through the national equivalency exam.
Her stage name has a bookish origin. It comes from the nickname of Elizabeth Bennet, the sharp, self-assured heroine of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and it carries the idea of showing grace and self-respect. She loved it so much that she saved the name and its meaning in her phone notes and reread them often. The one downside, as she joked on Knowing Bros: searching "Liz" in Korean used to pull up Almond Breeze and Febreze before anything about her. These days the image results are basically all her face.
Then there's the voice. IVE doesn't officially rank positions, but she and An Yu-jin carry the main vocal load. The fun contrast is that her speaking voice is low and cool, yet the moment she sings it turns crystal clear and dreamy, especially when she slides into falsetto. She had the most lines on the debut single ELEVEN and cried through the first-win encore while still keeping the live spotless. When pre-release Kitsch gave her one line under six seconds, fans were upset, and then title track I AM handed her the most lines in the group plus the big climax note. Fans who felt shortchanged by her line counts in LOVE DIVE and After LIKE finally got their payoff when her chorus from an After LIKE collab with LANY, sung alongside Rei, blew up on Shorts.
Her covers keep going viral. In 2024 she sang IU's Love wins all with Rei, and IU herself later said she fell for Liz's tone. In 2025 she joined Hangout with Yoo for its '80s song festival special and recreated Lee Ji-yeon's Stop the Wind with full retro feeling, a moment big enough to land her a rookie nomination at the MBC Entertainment Awards. She's rewritten her own lyrics for a Taeyeon cover and wrote the words for her solo track Unreal on IVE's 2026 album.
As a Jeju native she's seriously good at Jejueo. She was raised partly by her grandparents, so she understands it almost like a native speaker, and she aced a notoriously hard Jeju dialect quiz on a YouTube show. Her parents regularly ship tangerines and hallabong from their own orchard to the dorm. She also sang in a Jeju children's choir, and when she busted out the Jeju kids' song Joamasi on Jay Park's talk show, it went viral all over again.
Offstage she's pure chaos. When flustered she spits out made-up words fans call "Liz language," which is why they tease her for speaking "zero languages" and worse Korean than Rei, who's Japanese. She throws scissors in rock-paper-scissors almost every single time. Her motto is "Don't get swept away," though she admits it's just a motto and she gets swept away like anyone else. She's also the member who loves teasing leader Yu-jin by calling her by her full name, precisely because Yu-jin hates it. She first met maknae Leeseo when she was in her last year of middle school and Leeseo was in sixth grade, and even though she's not usually the one to approach people, she started the conversation and they talked for over an hour. Thanks to her cat-like face she has a whole "-nyangi" nickname series, from Cheese-nyangi to Injeolmi-nyangi.