Serene (pianist)

Serene is ethnically Chinese and spent her childhood in a variety of regions within North America.[1] As a pianist, she is largely self-taught; she also taught herself to write code at age 9.[3] She attended Carnegie Mellon University, graduating with a degree in computer science[1] in 2012.

She worked as the first engineer for technology incubator Google Ideas,[4] now Jigsaw LLC. While a senior fellow at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, she was a recipient of the Open Technology Fund’s Information Controls Fellowship, where she created Snowflake,[5][6] a pluggable transport enabling censorship circumvention for The Tor Project as its first use-case.

She is the founder of Snowstorm, the rearchitected V2 and commercialization of the Snowflake transport technology. In July 2023, Snowstorm finished its seed round of $3 million.[7] Snowflake came to prominence when the Tor network began using it to prevent hostile actors from blocking access to Tor.[8][9][10]

Serene is an advisory board member of the World Ethical Data Foundation.[11]

As of 2021, SERENE is a Bösendorfer Artist,[3] the sole non-conservatory pianist with such an affiliation.[12] She presented her Bösendorfer debut with the symphony at the Vienna Konzerthaus.[13]

Serene has given performances at both concert halls and such non-traditional settings as San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and inside a decommissioned Boeing 747 at Burning Man.[3] She received a composition credit on Kanye West’s opera Mary (2019).[1] She has released two EPs: Unraveling (2019), a collection of piano works by Maurice Ravel, and Rachmaninoff Concert No. 3 (2020). She experiences synesthesia[3] and has written code to project abstract, moving visualizations behind her performances.[14][15][16] She also has collaborated with Blue Man Group founder Chris Wink on music-technology projects and social-distanced events at Las Vegas's AREA15.

• Official website