Serene is an American classical concert pianist and technologist who created the

Snowflake A snowflake is a single ice crystal that has achieved a sufficient size, and may have amalgamated with others, which falls through the Earth's atmosphere as snow.Knight, C.; Knight, N. (1973). Snow crystals. Scientific American, vol. 228, no. ...

transport mechanism which was used heavily by

Tor Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to: Places * Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain * Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city * Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano * Tor Bay, Devon, England * Tor River, Western New Guinea, Indonesia Sc ...

Early life and education

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

Career in software

She worked as a programmer for technology incubator Google Ideas, now Jigsaw LLC. While working at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, she was a recipient of the

Open Technology Fund The Open Technology Fund (OTF) is an American nonprofit corporation that aims to support global Internet freedom technologies. Its mission is to "support open technologies and communities that increase free expression, circumvent censorship, and ...

’s Information Controls Fellowship, focusing on Snowflake, a pluggable transport enabling censorship circumvention for

The Tor Project The Tor Project, Inc. is a Seattle-based 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization founded by computer scientists Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson and five others. The Tor Project is primarily responsible for maintaining software fo ...

. She is the founder of Snowstorm, an attempt to commercialize the Snowflake transport technology. Snowflake came to prominence when the

Tor network Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network, consisting of more than seven thousand relays, to conc ...

began using it to prevent hostile actors from blocking access to Tor.

Career as a musician

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. She received a composition credit on

Kanye West Ye ( ; born Kanye Omari West ; June 8, 1977) is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, and fashion designer. Born in Atlanta and raised in Chicago, West gained recognition as a producer for Roc-A-Fella Records in the ea ...

’s opera ''Mary'' (2019). She has released two EPs: ''Unraveling'' (2019), a collection of piano works by Maurice Ravel, and ''Rachmaninoff Concert No. 3'' (2020). She experiences synesthesia and has written code to project abstract, moving visualizations behind her performances. She also has collaborated with

Blue Man Group Blue Man Group is an American performance art company formed in 1987. It was purchased in July 2017 by the Canadian company Cirque du Soleil. Blue Man Group is known for its stage productions, which incorporate many kinds of music and art, bot ...

founder

Chris Wink Chris Wink (born 1961 in New York City, New York) is an American theater performer and director. He is one of the founding members of the Blue Man Group, as well as co-founder of Blue School. He has won numerous awards as a writer and performer, i ...

on music-technology projects and social-distanced events at Las Vegas's AREA15. As of 2021, SERENE is a Bösendorfer Artist, the sole non-conservatory pianist with such an affiliation. She has been invited to perform as a Grand Prize Virtuoso winner and at the San Francisco Botanical Garden's Flower Piano program.

References

External links

Official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Serene American women classical pianists American classical pianists Living people Carnegie Mellon University alumni Year of birth missing (living people)