# Marian Goodell Interview ## Experiments in Community: Burning Man, Spirituality, and Transformative Experience an Interview with Marian Goodell 2025 Conference Anthology Marian Goodell, CEO of the Burning Man Project Jeffrey Breau, Program Lead, Harvard CSWR Psychedelics and Spirituality ![Birds eye view of the Burning Man temple](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2026-02/iStock-1679395960.jpg?h=dc956ecf&itok=31-NOPP2) Marian Goodell delivered the closing keynote for Psychedelic Intersections 2025. Goodell is the first Chief Executive Officer of Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that produces the Burning Man event and supports the growing global network of people and organizations it has inspired. Goodell sat down with Jeffrey Breau, CSWR Program Lead for Psychedelics and Spirituality, to reflect on her keynote, the Burning Man event, and the intersection of spirituality, psychedelics, community, and the arts. **Jeffrey Breau:** In your keynote, you mentioned that people frequently report transcendent and transformative experiences at Burning Man. This language—transcendence and transformation—also frames how we think about and study psychedelics at the Center for the Study of World Religions. In your understanding, why are people reliably having these experiences at Burning Man? What is the secret sauce? **Marian Goodell:** When you’re a little afraid and you're a little uncertain, but you stay in it—that's when you see change. I think it’s like when you see change in a relationship. It’s something uncomfortable to go through, but you figure out how to communicate to get on the other side of it and whether it makes that problem better, at the very least you feel better because you tried. I think the secret sauce shows up in the [10 Principles](https://burningman.org/about/10-principles/) \[community principles that reflect and shape the Burning Man ethos\], despite them being a descriptive response to what's happening \[at the event\]. In 2004, when people wanted to know what the secret sauce was, Larry Harvey \[the co-founder of Burning Man\] put in the time to identify what had transpired over the years as common threads of behavior. You can reverse engineer the principles to see that they really are the secret sauce. This includes things like helping people get away from their normal distractions. Taking you away from your distractions, working together, building things together are all extremely important. Through that you learn leadership skills and ways in which you decide to engage with people better. Burning Man attracts people on a fringe. Larry used to write plays and felt misunderstood. His father was a dust bowl immigrant and was not college educated. Larry wasn't either, but he felt estranged from his parents. We attract a wide variety of people, including a type of person that can be ostracized from society; they could be mentally unstable—could feel very isolated, could have trauma. And we really do accept everybody. But if you violate our norms, you will get ejected. People \[at Burning Man\] work hard to figure out what norms they can modify in themselves or become a part of, in order to stay with something that is so rich and diverse that they might find a piece of themselves in. That's another piece of the sauce, the culture celebrates the outsider, weirdo, and is inspired by those with crazy imaginations. Leave No Trace is, ironically, a part of it too. \[Leave No Trace is one of the 10 Principles that includes a commitment to “leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather.”\] Leave No Trace was practical. The Cacophony Society \[a group that was [instrumental in the origins of Burning Man](https://journal.burningman.org/2021/08/black-rock-city/building-brc/zone-episode-1-how-pranksters-created-burning-man/)\] did their parties out in the desert, they would go and take over ghost towns. They would bring a party for 45 people over the weekend, and they'd be in costume, play, and take everything back with them. None of these guys wanted anything to do with anybody else's trash—that's self-reliance. That is a form of everybody taking care of each other through self-reliance which ensues communal effort and civic engagement. \[Radical self-reliance, communal effort, and civic engagement are each in the 10 Principles.\] There was a time, in 1996, when things got crazy and people were burning stuff. This raised a question: was it going to be radical anarchy, or could we go further if we organized with street names and roads? There were no roads or street names before 1997. At the time, we were on private land, which meant the local county government had a say in permit requirements, and they insisted that streets be lit and have signs. We got away with no lighting, but we created signs so emergency vehicles would know where to go. The larger we got, the more we had to adopt things that created a civil environment for commonwealth and safety through shared understanding of the experience. And those are all extremely important parts of this. You could have a rogue burn of 10,000 or 12,000 people—the ‘free burn,’ the ‘renegade burn,’ all these names. I watched that be very successful. But I saw its tipping point. I saw if you had more than \[that number of people\] there with no street signs, it would have been more chaotic. For a short moment in time, it was like a big wacky rave-not-rave party. You came prepared with Burning Man principles to help your neighbor, be friendly and playful while building the experience together, in addition to setting up music and giving each other food for free. **JB:** Your keynote also discussed how play is an important element of Burning Man. Play is a part of life that we often view as separate from spirituality or transcendence. Can you speak about how Burning Man’s playful—or even hedonistic—elements connect to transformative or spiritual experience? **MG:** Play is a funny one. I didn’t go into that much in my keynote, because it seems so obvious to me. Cacophony Society theatrics and playfulness were deliberately merged into Burning Man. Their history was playfully culture jamming. I believe that's how play became inherent at the core of Burning Man. Nevertheless, there were people who thought that Larry would become more serious and the burning of the man would be like a painful ritual. Play, at its core, is intrinsic. It goes back to being children. We lose that in everyday life. Part of what we aim for are things that take us back to our inner child. That’s the place of innocence, wonder, hope, and connection. The art that we gravitate towards is whimsical—like the banana, which was one from a couple of years ago. There was a banana that when you went up and touched it, it would giggle. Larry loved that one. The giggling banana. We fund art that’s playful—that you can touch and you experience together. There’s nothing about experiencing art together and playing that is bad. Zero. You can't find a study or a person that says playing with art at Burning Man is a bad thing. No! If you look at things out in the world—even in city centers, when there's cool art—you can't touch it. People are worried about liability—is it going to fall? Is someone going to burn their hands on the hot metal? We're just like, ‘here, read your ticket.’ You're responsible for whether you touch it or move it or don't get on it because it doesn't feel safe. That's on you. **JB:** The [Burning Man Temple](https://burningman.org/event/preparation/temple/)—typically a more somber or reverential place at the event—feels like one of the things that separates Burning Man from a lot of other festival experiences. What is the origin of the Temple and what role do you think it plays in the Burning Man community? **MG:** The Temple started when David Best did an art piece at Burning Man. Larry Harvey didn't know David, but he went to see his piece. It was small and he'd built it with some friends to honor someone who died in a motorcycle accident. By this time, Larry recognized that the burning of the Man was a really big peak experience. In those days, the burning of the Man was happening on Sunday night. It was sending people away in a bit of a frenetic mindset. If you're dancing and singing at the top of your lungs to the best, most radical songs and then the music's over, you're all amped. You might want to go out and kick a trash can—just cause you're having fun and just cause the trash cans there. Your energy level is so high. We started to believe that it would be better to try to mellow it out and calmly dissipate the energy before exodus. At the same time, we had traffic problems. It started to become clear that if everybody stayed for the Man burn on Sunday, it was just not going to scale. We started to think about moving the Man burn to Saturday. Through the conversations that Larry and David had, we thought about bringing some reverence to the event after the Man burned. That would do a lot for the arc of the event. It would settle the vibe down and allow people to leave in waves. Its deep value to the community came from conversations between Larry and David Best. David would give people tours \[of the Temple\]. You'd stand there and he would tell you that this was to honor people that have been lost. They deliberately created it with that purpose—for people to have a spiritual center to hold grief in a public format. But people also hold marriages in the Temple. There are celebrations there, too. I think you have to have balance. It's balancing the ecstatic parts of \[the event\], but also gives people a place to be deeply human. We are what we are in part because of the Temple. It’s a very important part of who we are. It's another outlet of our human condition and our pain. **JB:** You called the Temple a “spiritual center,” and I’m curious what that means for you personally. In your keynote, you said you were raised Roman Catholic. Do you still identify as Roman Catholic? Has Burning Man changed your spiritual life at all? **MG:** I don't identify as a practicing Catholic, but Catholicism has affected my daily life. Like many religions, it gives you the moral basis for your behavior. I'm positive that some of my particular ways of being polite and proper— such as, speak when you're spoken to and don't question authority—came partly from my parents, and partly from going to Catholic school for a period of time. I remember asking in school about dinosaurs, and I was told that it was an inappropriate question to ask. I thought—well, where did the dinosaurs fit in with the Jesus story? I don't think I really understood spirituality much before I was with Larry Harvey. He talked a lot about spirituality and questioned what spirituality is. I had taken a religion class in college; it was one of my favorite classes at Goucher College. It was on world religions, and we read Buber's *I and thou* and a number of other works. But I still didn't quite get it until Burning Man came along and I dedicated myself to it. I now have different roles \[with Burning Man\]. I have the role of myself as an individual, and the role of a leader and founder. In the latter role, I don't think I'm trying to create any kind of spirituality, but I think there is spirituality in this work. **JB**: What does that mean to you? **MG:** It’s recognizing that I'm in service. I was thinking about spirituality this morning with regard to recent criticism of Burning Man—about the financial stress and feeling that the leaders should all take a pay cut. I think that notion is amusing in light of our global politics, particularly our American politics; that people think the Burning Man Project \[the nonprofit that Marian is CEO of, which organizes the Burning Man event; it is commonly referred to as the “Org”\] should behave like a corporate business and cut the people at the top. I think of it differently. We're a body of people that have taken leadership positions in order to keep the endeavor going, because it has such an important purpose and meaning for so many people. My spirituality is feeling so connected to something that feeds so many people and that dedication, that sense of service…. Honestly, I don’t always know where it comes from. It feels larger than me. **JB:** You mentioned that one of the ways Catholicism showed up in your childhood was about not questioning authority. This feels counter to a lot of Burning Man— **MG:** I forgot to share part of my narrative in my keynote, which is that my father was a Reagan Republican and I was raised to be financially conservative, not in a commune. Radical self-reliance really resonated with me, the idea that the individual needs to look out for their own ass. When I go to Washington DC, it's really fascinating to talk to politicians because they all see parts of themselves in Burning Man across the political spectrum. Republicans see libertarian independence and ‘fuck it, do what you can on public land.’ The Democrats see communal behavior and looking out for the greater good at all costs. I think we're both—and my upbringing prepared me for that. **JB:** How does that translate into your work as CEO? How do you represent that political balance in the Burning Man Project and Black Rock City \[the temporary city in Nevada that Burning Man creates and takes place in\]? **MG:** Politics didn't fit into our work when I started doing this 30 years ago. I didn't know who everyone voted for. We never ever talked about politics, until Obama. Larry Harvey wanted to back one of the San Francisco mayors. We were thinking, ‘that's a push in the wrong direction.’ And even Larry eventually said, ‘we shouldn't be political. People shouldn't know what our politics are.’ Over time it's become harder to stay apolitical. I think Trump getting elected the first time put us all in a position to have strong opinions. Then the pandemic divided people by whether they wore a mask or not, and whether they got a shot or not. Since the pandemic, I have driven our policies down a practical road. People said to me that by not saying anything, I was being political. My response was: I'm not going to mandate that all the staff get vaccines to go work at Burning Man, which is what some California companies were requiring. In January of 2022, as vaccines became more available, it came up again if we were going to require vaccines for our staff. I had been obsessively reading and watching for critical information since March of 2020, because I was responsible for my staff and some degree of public health at the event. I decided it was too left of center \[to mandate the Covid-19 shot\] and there were people inside the organization who reaffirmed that decision when they contacted me to say, ‘please don't make us do this.’ One thing that I didn't put up there \[in the keynote\] that is worth mentioning is when I started the \[Burning Man\] [Census](https://burningman.org/event/participate/volunteering/teams/census/), I did it so there were questions about political affiliation: Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green Party, Independent party, and decline to state. At one point, Republicans were 12% and Democrats were approximately 38%. That's moved a bit: Democrats are roughly 45% and Republicans are 5% or 6%, but ‘decline to state’ is still around 35%. When I talk to Burners, they usually tell me they're ‘decline to state.’ Decline to state is the most interesting part. If you're a passionate right or left wing, you are proud as fuck to tell everybody. To have more than 35% of the people decline to state—one thing that says is that people just don't want to tell you because it's their personal business. To me that’s the same as the polite part of Catholicism and a polite upbringing, frankly. But the other more interesting part is that they don't want to be put in a box: don't identify me in that context, because I'm more dynamic than that; how I show up in the world cannot be identified in a politicized binary. **JB:** It is fascinating to hear the ways you are balancing pressures from the outside world and seeking a middle or “practical path” within the Burning Man Project and at the event. At the same time, I’m curious if you see your work or Burning Man itself being a catalyst for change in the so-called “default world?” \[The world outside Black Rock City is sometimes called the ‘default world’ by Burners.\] **MG:** I think Burning Man *can* make great social change, but it can't do it if we spend too much time gravitating in directions that are extreme. I don't believe that what we do is politically extreme. What we do is push people towards connecting across divides through building, working, and playing together. It’s about understanding one another—in a harsh condition where you can't just get up and leave. We’re creating conditions for people to deeply connect in profound ways. **JB:** Beyond creating these conditions are there ways you or the Burning Man Project are trying to affect change in the world? **MG:** We don’t follow the framework of a typical social justice organization. This question comes up often inside the organization. The next tier of leadership and volunteers \[say things like\] ‘the Org needs to say this’ and ‘the Org needs to do that.’ I really believe that's for individuals to do. If you believe passionately about something, then engage in that belief and embrace the philosophy of a ‘do-ocracy.’ I believe empowering people to be who they are, show up in all of their glory, and convene with others is radical. It is understanding other people and listening to them—trying to empathize and be a human being. That is radical. That is what we're trying to do. We're just trying to do it without any political assumptions and any social justice kind of mantra. And it's working. I mean, are we trying to take over the Earth? Larry used to say that we could change the world. But he liked to exaggerate. **JB:** You don't believe that? **MG:** Someone \[at the conference\] asked me a question at the tail end: what did I see in 25 years? If we're successful—even if the event goes away—the meme of what is powerful about Burning Man will continue on. Burning Man will still exist in regional Burns and microevents. There will be communities that are practicing radical self-expression and radical self-reliance in different formats. I think if the event goes away there will be an increase in that. People will be forced to produce even more connectivity focused convenings. It will increase engagement with the evolving culture. Without the big event, it will be up to them to do it themselves. It is changing the world. It's changing individuals; it's bringing boundless compassion and connection. And it is bringing spirituality. I think caring about humans and ourselves is a spiritual practice. **JB:** It sounds like there is a tension in your answer between the focal point on Black Rock City and the spirit of Burning Man going out into the world. Is that a tension in your mind? **MG:** Burning Man is like a retreat center and a family picnic at the same time. If you said, ‘I want to feel connected and come away with a sense of playfulness and hope in humanity,’ well, \[my way of doing that\] would be to put people that didn't know each other in a fairly tight container. Give them something to do together—to build something together. Add in some minor crisis so that they have to figure it out together, and they're going to come away changed. With Burning Man, we don't put the weather into place, but we have deliberately chosen to be in a climate that is challenging. We've worked hard to focus our city’s design on social engagement. That’s part of the purpose of theme camps and art. Art that's not just things you stare at and can’t touch. There are no velvet ropes at Burning Man. There are things to say, ‘don't climb me,’ but usually that's because it's dangerous—not because nobody wants fingerprints on it. Those are the criteria that we're advancing and the connection we’re furthering inside Burning Man and outside in the world. It can totally be done! I don’t feel like the Black Rock City event is a limiting factor. What’s limiting is the capacity for us to tell a story that is compelling enough that people don't write it off as just being a party in the desert. All of this was very, very organic. This came from Larry’s heart. He burned something on the beach and people came around it. At Burning Man, people get to participate in this big experiment. We used to call it an, “experiment in temporary community”—that was a tagline for a long time. Well, it's now become more than an experiment. That experiment in temporary community has now generated other sub-experiments in community. Take away the “temporary” now. I think Larry originally used words that he saw as the best possible scenario. You came to Burning Man—you felt you got connected. He did not conceive of these communities that would start replicating Burning Man out in the world. He didn't see that. But I saw that. I was on the internet. I wanted to identify people in different cities to be local leaders so that they can decentralize organizing and the dissemination of our culture. At first, Larry was like, “well, I don't quite understand.” And people were worried about the idea of branding. I responded, ‘no, we're going to let them use their own words.’ It's not Burning Man Austin. It's Austin. I told the Austin people to create their own name. They were the first \[regional\] event; they first called it Burning Flip Side and now it's just Flip Side. What was that doing? It was intentionally creating an environment where people were learning together and engaging together—really engaging and playing freely. The Internet gave us insight to set up the stage, the information \[transfer\], and the decentralization for Burning Man to happen in the same kind of format outside of the event. **JB:** You cited the role of the internet in spreading the Burning Man ethos. These days Burning Man and Silicon Valley are often lumped together in the conversation. How do you view Burning Man's relationship to Silicon Valley? As tech has become more ascendant, has that been a good thing for Burning Man? **MG:** Technology completely changed Burning Man. Wired Magazine changed Burning Man. I don't know of another magazine or article that could have been a greater force for change. The Wired Article, \[“[Greetings from Burning Man](https://www.wired.com/1996/11/burningman-2/)!”\], came out in November of 1996, a pivotal time for the Burning Man organization. The 1996 event was the one where a participant died, among other accidents. \[Burning Man\] needed to get organized or it was going to cease to exist by necessity. And that article was in the middle of this crucial moment. It's when I came along. We decided to spend the time, quit our jobs, and do the work to make it real. That spark of entrepreneurs and technology and the growing internet was a symbiotic trifecta. We could still be a pretty underground thing, but we couldn’t be a 70,000 person underground thing. No way. The technology, amount of people and money, and innovative ideas created beautiful theme camps, art cars, and cool ways of existing out there. There's a friend of mine who is an MIT graduate and he just keeps upping his game and how he brings himself and his art out to Burning Man. **JB:** Can you elaborate on what you see this “symbiotic trifecta” doing for the Burning Man community? **MG:** Having participants of all backgrounds and dispositions makes for a vibrant city and thriving global arts and cultural movement. Additionally, by including everyone, including titans of business, the reach exponentially increases across all demographics. Inspired by the connection and awe participants experience and help create in the desert, they in turn act and live differently in the world at large. The 70,000 annual attendees have the potential to impact millions of people in millions of ways beyond the desert. I personally had a friend who used to work for Apple and then went to work for Visa Corp. And I joked, ‘he went to the dark side.’ And he rebutted, ‘wouldn't you want business to be changed from the inside by Burners?’ And I thought, ‘you're right.’ I want all the mavericks to participate. I think we're a maverick and leadership machine. We help people find their inner maverick and connect them to others. Technology is an industry of mavericks. So, of course it found and fed Burning Man. **JB:** One question that came up in the conference Q/A was around access and inclusion. Your previous answer pointed to this, but I want to give you more space to talk about what the Burning Man Project is doing to make the event accessible and inclusive. **MG:** It's a challenging piece to have definitive answers. People sort of do see Burning Man as Black Rock City, demanding that we make it accessible in all the ways that they're accustomed to the government allowing access to things. And that's challenging. It's challenging partly because sometimes it's like, ‘well, how can we empower you to do it?’ If you see the failures and shortcomings, what can you do as a citizen and a participant in the experiment to actually help make the change you want to see in the world? Rather than looking to the organization and asking us to do it. That's one piece of my answer. The other piece is, what parts can we help with? We try to create opportunities based on what is reasonable. For example, the Man has not always been accessible to people with wheelchairs, but if someone who is disabled wants to reach a higher spot, we bring in equipment to give them access. \[The percent of\] people of color at the event has come up over the years. The needle gets moved because people of color say, ‘I want to know how to make the change.’ You can make faster changes if people do the work and make the art. We saw more international people begin to come when we did a project for two years in a row giving the \[international\] regionals money and access to do art and then they brought their friends. I would say accessibility and inclusivity is a very active thing—that we're doing our part—but importantly we're creating opportunities for other groups. The Black Burner project, for instance, was one woman who created her own nonprofit to be a mentor for other people's art projects. She was involved in her own art project and then directing other people towards their projects and letting the nonprofit know that people are interested in participating. Then we put tickets aside helping create access for these identified groups. We made it clear that the \[theme\] camps that were doing their part to bring either projects around sustainability or around accessibility would get access to purchase extra tickets. It's a lot about access in all these different ways—ticket access and access to funds for art and things like that–but also about celebrating and showcasing incredible participant stories to inspire the next generation. **JB:** My last question is about the so-called psychedelic renaissance. The conversation around psychedelics and their acceptance in the U. S. has changed considerably in the last 20 years. Given these large cultural shifts, have you noticed any changes in Black Rock City? Or similarly, do you think that Burning Man has influenced the psychedelic renaissance in any way? **MG:** Burning Man is a place where people can talk about fringe things in a fairly open, non-commercial environment. If psychedelics are a way people find their inner selves, connectivity, and heal—and you're at a place that helps you find your authentic self—then the narrative of what psychedelics can do in \[the Burning Man\] context is obvious. I know there are many pioneers on the East Coast that are doing \[psychedelic\] experiments and writing about psychedelics, but how did all of that \[academic\] writing get to the mainstream? I think Burning Man had a lot to do with that. Although, we really weren't raised on psychedelics. Larry and the others used acid on occasion, but they weren't hippies doing a lot of groovy stuff. They came from that generation; Larry moved to San Francisco in 1969—the tail end of the summer of love, he used to say. Graham St. John has done a book about the rave community and Burning Man. I didn't realize how important Burning Man was to rave culture, but he charts it back to 1997. I think it's the same with psychedelics. I think that the colorfulness of our event and it being a platform for people to experiment made it easier and obvious for some people to want to use Burning Man as a platform to experiment safely with psychedelics. But we were never deliberately creating a safe space. We were deliberately protecting the perception that we were not encouraging psychedelics. That would point to credit being given to the culture of the outside world—the culture of psychedelics and the movement towards legalizing them—as being just as responsible as our crucible. I think it would be fair to say that Burning Man, the event—Black Rock City and that experience—probably has been a player in the narrative around normalizing psychedelics; but not the organization. There's a difference between the organization, the Burning Man experience, and Black Rock City. **JB:** Is part of your answer responding to the fact that these substances are still illegal? **MG:** I went to see Michael Pollan speak at a fundraiser for MAPS. There were some famous psychedelic funders there. I was really very taken. I read Michael's book. I loved it. This was before the pandemic, and I told Rick \[Doblin\] that I wanted to come out of my shell. I wanted to be a little more supportive of the psychedelics movement. Then, someone inside my organization, without me even telling them, made it clear that the organization should be very careful because of all these people in other countries that are actively building Burning Man communities and we need to consider their safety. I thought, ‘you're right. I can't do it.’ All we would gain \[from my voice in this matter\] is that I'm validating the people that care about \[psychedelics\] for political, financial, and societal reasons. They're doing plenty of work on their own, and they don't need me or Burning Man Project to do it. We can passively support by not having a police state at Burning Man and by giving people the resources they need to find one another while experimenting, that's what we do best. It's about personal choice and Burning Man is really designed to be a little bit of everything. **JB:** If psychedelics were not criminalized, would your stance as an Org be different about them? **MG:** We would probably have more resources and training for people, either in our medical side or in our leadership and volunteerism. We’ve got Zendo and MAPS and many groups that uphold that responsibility. So, what would it change if it was legalized? I don't know. I would still want to know what was the benefit of speaking about it and how that helps what we’re here to do. I think criminalization is the sad part. But we would only change our stance if psychedelics were globally accepted. What Burning Man Project is really into is our stance on having pockets of global engagement. **JB:** Thank you so much, Marian. This was phenomenally far reaching, and I so appreciate you taking the time to talk. **MG:** It was lovely chatting with you, Jeffrey. Author Biography ### Jeffrey Breau Jeffrey is Program Lead for the Center’s Psychedelics and Spirituality program and a social science researcher focusing on contemporary psychedelic churches and psychedelic chaplaincy. Jeffrey is currently conducting a multiyear ethnography of novel psychedelic churches in the United States. The study explores these communities’ ritual practices, theologies, social structures, and approaches to safety. Jeffrey also researches psychedelic chaplaincy. In that capacity he is a member of the ketamine chaplaincy advisory group at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, where he formerly completed an internship providing ketamine integration chaplaincy. Jeffrey is also a Project Affiliated Researcher of PULSE (Psychedelic Use, Law, and Spiritual Experience) at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. He received his MDiv. from Harvard Divinity School in 2024. ![Headshot of Jeffrey Breau](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2024-12/breau_headshot_internet_1.jpg?h=717444a3&itok=aaum07bo) Author Biography ### Marian Goodell Marian Goodell is the first Chief Executive Officer of Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that produces the world-renowned Burning Man event and supports the growing global network of people and organizations it has inspired. Marian’s stewardship of Burning Man’s anti-consumerist, participatory, and celebratory culture has set it on a seemingly unstoppable growth path. Burning Man communities and leaders are active in 75 countries and collectively produce more than 100 events annually. Today Burning Man’s largest event is home to 80,000 thinkers, makers, and creative problem-solvers who come together each year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to build the world’s most imaginative, experimental city. Burning Man has grown from the scrappy, anarchist gathering of a few thousand people when Marian first attended in 1995, into an international cultural movement that sparks innovation in design, business, technology, education, and urban planning. Marian is a keen connector and storyteller. Driven by her belief that we can do more together than we can do alone, she brings together people, ideas, and resources in creative and unexpected ways that move organizations and communities forward. ![Headshot of Marian Goodell](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2026-02/marian_goodell_headshot.jpg?h=cf4e4d9a&itok=sNp0PNgz) #### Suggested Citation Breau, Jeffrey and Marian Goodell. *An Interview with Marian Goodell*. In *Psychedelic Intersections: 2025 Conference Anthology*, edited by Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026. © License: CC BY-NC.