Serene

Serene is an American concert pianist and computer scientist. She is the inventor of Snowflake, the anti-censorship software package used by The Tor Project. Serene is a touring classical musician. Her experimental performances combine high technology with pianism, such as performing piano while accompanied by musical robots.

Early life and education Serene is ethnically Chinese and spent her childhood in a variety of regions within North America. 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.

Career as a musician

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. She has performed with Grimes, using EEG and generative AI music technology.

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 also has collaborated with Blue Man Group founder Chris Wink on music-technology projects and social-distanced events at Las Vegas's AREA15.

In 2024, Serene premiered a piano robotics concert at a fusion energy facility while improvising with Jaron Lanier.