Brenda was born and raised in Lodi, California, the daughter of Dick and Jeanine Kinder Hanson. Both parents are active musicians, her mother a piano teacher and church organist and her father a singer who was a member of a male quartet and frequent Sabbath School soloist.

Brenda started lessons on piano at age seven, saxophone in the fifth grade, and organ in the seventh grade. While participating in band and choir from the fifth through twelfth grades, she was inspired by her choir director, Hugh Winn, to become a music teacher. Accordingly, following graduation from Lodi Academy in 1981, she enrolled at Pacific Union College as a music education major, with piano and organ as her performance areas. In her senior year, she received the Outstanding Performer's Certificate.

Hanson graduated from PUC in 1985 and began teaching band and choral music at Glendale Adventist Academy and its grade school program that fall. Four years later, Craig Mohr, who had just graduated from PUC, was hired to conduct the band program, and Brenda assumed direction of just the choral program, which includes a 5/6 grade school choir, junior high choir, the Glendale Academy Chorale, and men's and women's choirs. With both of them able to focus exclusively on their respective programs, they have developed a music department widely known for its excellence.

Brenda and Craig married in July 1991, and four years later their daughter, Kaitlin Jean, was born. Kaitlin, now sixteen, sings and plays the oboe. Brenda completed an M.Mus. with a choral conducting emphasis in 1993 at California State University, Northridge, where she studied conducting with John Alexander.

The Glendale Academy Chorale has traveled regionally and nationally, touring in California, Arizona, and the Northwest multiple times, and to Chicago and Washington, D.C. three times. In 2000, it won the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) Golden State South Choral Competition. Brenda received the Zapara Excellence in Teaching Award in 1991 and the NAD Alumni Achievement Foundation Excellence in Teaching Award in 2004.

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