ABOUT Brenna serrenti wee

Brenna Serrenti Wee is a highly-regarded pianist, collaborative artist and educator. She holds two Master’s degrees from the University of Melbourne, with specialisations in Collaborative Pianism and Piano Pedagogy. A versatile pianist, she also studied Jazz Piano performance at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Scholarships from both the Singapore and Australian governments funded her musical studies and her Graduate Diploma in Education.

Brenna has received numerous awards at major competitions, such as the prestigious Australian Society of Keyboard Music and the Diner’s Club International Piano Competitions. Highlights in the classical arena include being an Associate Artist with soprano Joanna Cole in the Quadrangle Series at Anlaby (South Australia), touring regional Victoria with the George Dreyfus’ Film Orchestra, being featured on Radio 3MBS FM in 2009 – 2012, and engaged as the Official Accompanist for various Eisteddfods. She has also worked with various jazz ensembles and as a soloist. Highlights included playing at the York Jazz Festival and the Summer in the Park Jazz series in Western Australia.

As a natural complement to her Master’s research on the impact of globalization on Australian contemporary art music, Brenna teamed up with educator, Alex Serrenti, to start Bridges Collective. As Artistic Director of the ensemble, she was awarded multiple grants and awards from the Australia Council for the Arts, the Victorian Multicultural Commission and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in recognition of the ensemble’s valuable work in bridging cultures. These awards have enabled Brenna to take the ensemble on musical exchanges to Canberra, Melbourne, Singapore and West Malaysia where the ensemble has a well-established artist residency and composition workshop program. These concerts facilitated cultural exchange through music-making which included collaborations of classical musicians in Western art music with their counterparts in the Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Malay, Persian and Yemeni traditions. She has been featured on ABC Radio Australia, Vision Australia Radio and 3MBS FM Radio where she spoke about the challenges of presenting culturally unfamiliar ground-breaking work to audiences.

More recently, Brenna has become a strong advocate for bridging the gap between pianists with large and small hands. She believes that the availability of alternate-sized keyboards will enable future generations of young and established pianists with smaller hand spans to engage in music-making with greater ease, confidence and reduced risk of injury. To support this cause, she has presented concerts at the annual International Stretto Piano Festivals, highlighting pianos fitted with narrower keys as alternatives to the standard keyboard.

Brenna continues to share the joy of music-making through both performance and education. She holds positions as an accompanist at Monash University, as a piano mentor and accompanist at Haileybury College, and will appear at the 6th Stretto Festival later this year.