Serene (pianist)

Serene (born 1991) is an American classical concert pianist[1] and technologist.

Serene emigrated from China as an infant.[1] As a pianist, she is largely self-taught; she also taught herself to write code at age 9.[2] She attended Carnegie Mellon University, graduating with a degree in computer science[1] in 2012. She worked as a programmer for technology incubator Google Ideas,[3] now Jigsaw LLC. While working at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, she was a recipient of the Open Technology Fund’s Information Controls Fellowship, focusing on Snowflake,[4] a pluggable transport enabling censorship circumvention for The Tor Project.

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.[2] 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[2] and has written code to project abstract, moving visualizations behind her performances.[5] She also has collaborated with Blue Man Group founder Chris Wink on music-technology projects and social-distanced events at Las Vegas's AREA15. As of 2021, SERENE is a Bösendorfer Artist,[2] the sole non-conservatory pianist with such an affiliation.