She signed with Box Corporation at age 16, and made her runway debut at the Amazon Fashion Week Tokyo F/W 2017 show.

Motola landed her first feature film role in the coming-of-age drama Girls' Encounter (2018).

She received critical acclaim in 2020 for her lead role in the drama film Voices in the Wind, for which she won the Kinema Junpo Award for Best New Actress, and was nominated for several other accolades.

Serena Motola was born on October 9, 1998 in Tokyo, Japan and is an only child.

[2][3] Her parents met in the United States, where her mother was working as a Japanese language teacher at the time before moving to Tokyo together.