Serene

Sereneis an American classical concert pianist and technologist who created the Snowflake transport mechanism which was used heavily by Tor.

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.

She worked as the first engineer for technology incubator Google Ideas, 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, 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. Snowflake came to prominence when the Tor network began using it to prevent hostile actors from blocking access to Tor.

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

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

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’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 founder Chris Wink on music-technology projects and social-distanced events at Las Vegas's AREA15.