Speakers 2011

Kate Raudenbush

Kate Raudenbush is a New York City-based artist who creates social commentary through sculpture using themes and symbolism from history and mythology, geometry and architecture. She utilizes welded and laser-cut metal, acrylic, mirror, glass and light to form enveloping allegorical environments in an effort to shape an awareness of our changing earth and evolving humanity.

Hollis Doherty

Hollis Doherty is a writer, actress, and currency activist. A lifelong passion for protecting the Earth’s natural resources led her to a Biology degree at the University of Colorado. When she recently discovered the true story of the currency experiment during the Great Depression in Woergl, Austria, she flew there to research and ultimately write a screenplay, “The Miracle in Woergl”.

Larry Harvey

Larry Harvey (born 1948) is the main co-founder of the Burning Man festival, along with his friend Jerry James. What started in 1986 as a summer solstice evening ritual burning of their artistic creation of an effigy of a man with a group of just a dozen people at San Francisco’s Baker Beach, which then became an annual event that over 4 years grew to more than 800 people. In 1990, in collaboration with the SF Cacophony Society, the event moved to Labor Day weekend in the Black Rock Desert, where it has grown precipitously from a 3 day, 80 persons “zone trip,” to an 8 day festival with over 50,000 “participants.” As the population grew by the mid ’90’s to top several thousands, the encampment started to be referred to as Black Rock City, it now has a year round staff headquartered in San Francisco, managing an over 12 million dollar annual budget. In 1997, six of the main organizers formed Black Rock City LLC to manage the event with Larry Harvey as the executive director, which position he still holds. He is also the president of the Black Rock Arts Foundation, a non-profit art grant foundation for promoting interactive collaborative public art installations in communities outside of Black Rock City. He scripts and co-chair/curates the arts departments annual event theme and is the main spokesperson and political strategist for the organization. He has been featured in such engagements as San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral “Radical Ritual” with the Very Reverend Alan Jones, the Oxford Student Union, Cooper Union in NYC, Harvard’s International Conference on Internet and Society as a panelist, the Walker Art Center in Minnesota and the San Francisco Commonwealth Club as well as many others.

David Koren

David Koren is the Founder and Executive Producer of FIGMENT, a free multi-city participatory arts event. He has significant experience in arts, marketing, architecture, theatre, event production, and management. David is an Associate Principal and Director of Marketing at Perkins Eastman, the largest architecture firm based in New York.

Reverend Billy Talen

Chris Paine

Jim Glaser

Spencer Greenberg

Sara Farley

Tim Fielding

Peter Haas

Rosie Lila

Klaudia Oliver

Marisa Lenhardt