Luis Eduardo Luna

Luis Eduardo Luna was born in Florencia, in the Colombian Amazon region. He is both a Guggenheim fellow and Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. Luna worked with Pablo Amaringo to establish the internationally recognized USKO-AYAR Amazonian School of Painting in Pucallpa, Peru. From 1994-1998, he taught as a Professor of Anthropology in Brazil, and currently teaches as a Senior Lecturer at the Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki. He has also been an Associate of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University since 1986.

Ira Cohen

Ira Cohen, editor, filmmaker, photographer, and poet, was born in 1935.

He is the founder of numerous ground-breaking movements and reviews such as the Akashic Record, the Starstreams Poetry Series (Kathmandu), and the Universal Mutant Repertory Company (when he became known as “The Father of Mylar Photography”): he has also worked as contributing editor of publications such as Ins and Outs (Amsterdam), Ignite (New York), the NY Black Book, and Nexus (Dayton, Ohio). Selected volumes of his poetry have been published in Holland (The Stauffenberg Cycle and Other Poems), in Oracle, Arizona (On Feet of Gold, Synergetic Press) and England (Media Shamans Ratio 3 with Gerard Malanga and Angus MacLise), as well as countless audio and CD recordings of performances with diverse artistic collaborators including Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs and Jack Smith. His photographs have been used on various record covers by artists including Jimi Hendrix, John McLaughlin, Pharoah Sanders and other covers for Bill Laswell at Axiom Records.

In the realm of visual art, his portrait photography depicts subjects from North Africa to India and the Himalayas to Ethiopia. His work has been exhibited extensively at various institutions including ART (New York), the October Gallery (London), the Gallery of Photography (Dublin), and the TB Institute (Tokyo). Photographs have been published in The London Sunday Times, Avant Garde, LIFE magazine, Facade (Paris), to cite only a few.

William Burroughs

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997)

William (Seward) Burroughs born 5 February 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri.

Rosé

Rosé was born deep in the Bronx in 1934. He began crafting his poetry while attending a number of colleges during the 50’s. After a stint in the army he bounced around working as a lifeguard, masseur and astrology writer. He saw his heaviest combat duty teaching High School in New York. In the early sixties he assiduously pursued Ancient Greek while dining on Mexican beaches, touring in European cafés and slumming in Moroccan dives. Between a stint of acting, including the movie “The Edge,” he published a book of drawings and launched skin diving trips throughout the Yucatan and the Florida Keys. His “School of the Night” specialized in occult classes and his “Liquid Wedge Gallery” made media history with sculptor Tony Price’s first “Atomic Art Show” in NYC in 1969.

Rosé is the father of two daughters. He lives with his wife in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he performs his poetry at the drop of a hat

John Allen (pen name Johnny Dolphin)

John ‘Dolphin’ Allen, is author, poet, playwright who invented, conceived and co-founded the Biosphere 2 project – the world’s largest laboratory for global ecology. Biosphere 2 set a number of world records in closed life system work including, among others, degree of sealing tightness, 100% waste recycle and water recycle, and duration of human residence within a closed system (eight people for two years). Allen has also conceived and co-founded nine other projects around the world, pioneering in sustainable co-evolutionary development.

He is currently the Chairman of Global Ecotechnics Corporation. This is an international project development and management company with a Biospheric Design Division engaged in designing and preparing to build the second generation of advanced materially closed biospheric systems and ecologically enriched biomic systems (www.biospheres.com); and an EcoFrontiers Division which owns and operates innovative sustainable ecological projects of which he was the co-founder and chief designer in France, Australia (5000 acre savannah regeneration project), Puerto Rico (1000 acre sustainable rainforest project) and England (www.ecotechnics.edu).
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Read an interview with John and David Jay Brown

Allen began the first manned Biosphere Test Module experiment in September 1988, residing in the almost fully recyclable closed ecological system environment for three days and setting a world record at that time, proving that closed ecological systems would work with humans inside. As the vice-president of Biospheric Development for the project, as well as Executive Chairman, Allen was responsible for the science and engineering that created the materially closed life system, as well as the development of spin-off technologies.