Meet the people who imagined this space and keep it focused on its values and goals.
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As Director of Programs for The Long Now Foundation, Danielle Engelman produces the monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking series as well as Long Now’s other public programs and events such as Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings, Jem Finer’s Longplayer; 1,000 years in 3 simultaneous acts and The Mechanicrawl. Danielle developed Long Now’s membership program which was launched in 2006 and now includes 4500 members in more than forty countries. She continues to oversee the program and also edits the Quarterly News for Long Now members.
Prior to Long Now, Danielle was Project Manager for the installation of San Francisco’s beloved site-specific sculpture Defenestration by artist Brian Goggin. She has worked with the Burning Man Project, the SF Fringe Festival, and numerous other arts organizations in the Bay Area. She co-created and co-produced the long-running living artist series The Tentacle Sessions with Laughing Squid.
A lifelong resident of the San Francisco-Bay Area, Danielle studied Ancient Near Eastern Art and Architecture at U.C. Berkeley, is a trained jeweler and metal-worker, and worked as a teacher and school administrator in Montessori education.
Board of Trustees
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Michael W. Taft is a meditation teacher, author, and podcaster. Michael teaches meditation courses, retreats, and individuals worldwide, and is the author of several books, including the bestselling The Mindful Geek. He is the founder and host of the Deconstructing Yourself podcast.
From Zen temples in Japan to yogi caves in India, Michael has been meditating for over thirty five years and has extensive experience in both Buddhist and Hindu Tantric practice. Michael is a co-founder of the groundbreaking Alembic center in Berkeley. He was previously editor-in-chief of Being Human, and was the long-time editorial director of Sounds True. Michael lives with his family in the Bay Area.
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Erik Davis is an author, award-winning journalist, sometimes podcaster, and popular speaker based in San Francisco. He is the author of five books, including High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s; Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica; The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape; and the 33 1/3 volume Led Zeppelin IV. His first and best-known book remains TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, a cult classic of visionary media studies that’s still in print.
Erik’s scholarly and popular essays on California, music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into over a dozen languages. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015. He currently writes the Substack publication Burning Shore.
