Business Team

Dana Harrison, Executive Producer
From 1998-2005 Dana Harrison was a core organizer of the Burning Man project, where she divided her attention between year-round and event-related responsibilities,  including leading the organization's budget and contracts processes, and managing teams who produced the event's Center Camp Cafe, CampArctica/Ice Sales and Staff Commissary.  

Dana came to her senses and began to apply her business skills and experience to the arts and non-profit communities, after 18 years as a financial, strategic and operational executive in the Financial Services industry, where she won numerous awards for excellence in leadership and innovation. She co-founded a non-profit organization that provides medical and humanitarian relief to Burmese refugees (www.planetcare.org), and an affordable live-work performance space in Oakland (www.oaklandnoodlefactory.org) that is now managed by the Northern California Land Trust.  Dana continues to work with the Burning Man organization as an member of the Advisory Board for the Black Rocks Arts Foundation, and as an occasional consultant to the BRC LLC.  She is excited to translate her long-time interest in expanding the impact of the principles and ethos of the Burning Man community beyond the bounds of the Black Rock Desert  into involvement in this project.

Nicole Maron, Producer
Although she first attended Burning Man in 1998, Nicole Maron truly joined the larger Burning Man community in 2000 as part of a large-scale sound art camp. Awakened to the substantial potential of community by the impressively supportive and organized late night dance scene in San Francisco, she became an active staff volunteer in the Burning Man organization after the 2000 event, spending the next four years co-managing the year-round Burning Man volunteer Web Team. In 2002 she also joined the Center Camp Café team, managing volunteers and various projects at the event. A professional information architect and interaction designer for web applications and software in San Francisco, she found that her communication skills, organizational ability, and talent for inspiring others translated well to this direct community action.

Using her ability to marry the big picture with the steps needed to finish painting it, Nicole helped develop the Web Team from five to twenty active members, reorganized the team into more functional areas of expertise, redesigned the Burning Man Extranet and laid the groundwork for the Environmental section of burningman.com. She led the Burning Man diaspora in defining their own guidelines and code of conduct for the Eplaya community bulletin board with the proverbial velvet-clothed iron fist, and introduced documentation and project management practices to the Café Décor team. She joined members of her late night dance community in creating 17Reasons, a non-profit that raised funds for local shelters through dance parties and organized beach and creek clean-ups in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2001-2003. She also worked on the companion DVD for Drama In the Desert, one of the first high-end Burning Man-themed art books.

Inspired by the coupling of gifting and civic responsibility in the Burning Man sphere, and recently re-inspired by the phenomenal work of Burners Without Borders and the Black Rock Arts Foundation, Nicole is eager to do what needs doing to bring the best of Burning Man off of the playa and into the hearts of people everywhere. 

Chef Juke (aka Patrice Mackey), Web Team
Chef Juke has been attending Burning Man since 1994. He earned his nickname while coordinating a communal kitchen for The Blue Light District, the first large-scale village at Burning Man, from 1997-1999 when he fed up to 550 people a day for 5 days.

In addition to cooking, one of his other hobbies is photography and he has numerous photographs from Burning Man on his burningman website: http://www.chefjuke.com/burnman

In addition to his on-playa exploits, Juke has been the webmaster for the late Ken Kesey's website, www.intrepditrips.com and coordinates the Annual Santa Claus Pub Crawl, now in it's 10th year, in his hometown of Eugene Oregon.

Creative Team

Christopher Fülling, Director
American director/tenor living in Berlin, Christopher Fülling directed the last four of Pepe Ozan's "operas" at the Burning Man.  In 1998, their first opera together, The Temple of Rudra became the subject of the feature film The Eye of Rudra by Dean Mermel; and 1998 they created and directed a voodoo opera, Le Mystere de Papa Loko, after two research trips to Haiti and a weeklong initiation as voodoo priests.  The "Atlantian" tarot (as well as, language, music, initiations) that were created for the operas in 2000 and 2002 have inspired subsequent performances in Europe.  In 2004-5, he co-wrote and performed Joe Playa: a Black Rock Opera, with Eric Oberthaler, both on the playa and in SF and LA.

Erik Davis, Writer
Erik Davis is an independent scholar, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. He is the author, most recently, of The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (Chronicle Books), with photographs by Michael Rauner. He also wrote Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum) and TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Harmony), a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been translated into five languages. His essays on music, media, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality have appeared in over a dozen books, including AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Μan (University of New Mexico Press), Zig Zag Zen (Chronicle), The Disinformation Book of Lies (Disinfo), 010101: Art in Technological Times (SFMOMA), and Prefiguring Cyberculture (MIT Press).

Erik has contributed articles and essays to a variety of publications, including Bookforum, ArtForum, Salon, Rolling Stone, Spin, Blender, the LA Weekly,
and the Village Voice. For many years he was a contributing writer at Wired.

A vital speaker, Erik has given talks at major universities, media art, and festivals around the world. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UC Davis, the California Institute of Integral Studies, the New York Open Center, and Esalen. He has been  interviewed by CNN and the BBC, and appeared in Craig Baldwin’s underground film, the SciFi media critique Specters of the Spectrum. Some of his work can be accessed at www.techgnosis.com.

Ron Meiners, Evangelist-at-Large
Ron Meiners has been involved with Burning Man as a volunteer since his first year on the playa (1998), and has worked with the Burning Man volunteer Media Team (where he met his wife, Lee Gilmore), the volunteer Web Team (where he still occasionally contributes in matters of online community), and the DMV.  He has primarily worked in games and online community for the last ten years, in part inspired by the way the culture of Burning Man transforms those who are involved with it, and is transformed by them.  This has lead to interest in community and culture, and the realization that culture is produced by the participants, here and on the playa.  His chance meeting with Mark Nichols and Julie Lewis at Burning Man 2006 led to the formation of the team that is creating How To Survive The Apocalypse: A Burning Man Roadshow.

Mark Nichols, Composer
Mark Nichols began writing film scripts and musical theater at the age of 21 with the his pop fable, Little Boy Goes To Hell, which became a hit for Seattle's first "fringe" theater, Annex, under the direction of Garrett Bennett. The show predated Seattle's (and the world's) current obsession with circus by about ten years--combining rock, big band, theater and physical humor, and setting the bar for hundreds of Seattle fringe productions to follow, but who's counting. Since then, Mark has written and produced a vast catalogue of shows for children and adults, including Seattle's longest-running children's show ever, WONKA!   Mark's original shows like, Joe Bean, and Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle have been performed numerous times in the US and Europe.  As a sound designer and composer/producer, Mark recently completed Delaware, featuring "Seattle's favorite art band," "Awesome", Lauren Weedman's hit show Bust! at the Empty Space Theater in Seattle, and the award-winning Slotin Sonatas.Mark has worn the hat of orchestral arranger/conductor many times, and won a European Grammy for Midnight Choir's album Amsterdam Stranded.   Mark has written for both the Seattle Symphony and the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra.  Mark's movie soundtracks include scores for Farewell to Harry and A Relative Thing, both directed by Bainbridge Island native, Garrett Bennett who, with Mark, also created Flared Pants, starring the legendary Paul Giamatti, which has won awards and is actually pretty funny.  Mark has arranged for and/or toured the US and Europe with bands such as Jeremy Enigk of Sunny Day Real Estate, The Fire Theft, Terry Lee Hale, The Squirrels, Trillian Green, Midnight Choir, and The Walkabouts and will be on the road with Sean Nelson & Robyn Hitchcock this spring. Very recently, Mark completed production/arrangement of the Nelson Sings Nilsson album, featuring singer Sean Nelson (Harvey Danger) performing the late Harry Nilsson. The CD features horns, strings, piano, xylophones, backup trio, drums, bass, and a children's choir, all recorded at Mark's house.

Mark writes an average of four original musical theater pieces per year, and is currently working on How To Survive The Apocalypse: A Burning Man Roadshow, PolyAma: A Two-Person Show, and Ivanha: The Worst High School Musical In The World with long-time collaborator, Island Treasure (TM) Bob McAllister.