Allyson Grey

An accomplished visionary artist, Allyson Grey’s paintings invent a symbol system representing chaos, order and secret writing. Co-founder of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in New York City, is the wife and partner of internationally renowned artist, Alex Grey, and the mother of film actress Zena Grey. Born in 1952, Allyson received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Tufts University in 1976. She has edited and co-written a dozen books and journals, taught art at Tufts University, the Boston Museum School and at Omega Institute for 17 years. A leader of a growing community, Allyson has spoken widely at conferences and symposia. She has received several commissions for long-term and permanent installations of her artwork, which has been exhibited throughout the U.S. with many paintings collected by both corporate and private collections.

Danielle Engelman

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 02006 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. 

David Presti

David Presti,  PhD, is a professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught for 30 years. He also worked for more than a decade in the clinical treatment of addiction and post-traumatic stress at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Francisco, and since 2004 has been teaching and dialoguing about neuroscience with Tibetan Buddhist monastics in India, Bhutan, and Nepal. He has been involved in shifting policy related to research and psychotherapy with psychedelics for 30 years. He has doctorates in biology from Caltech and in clinical psychology from the University of Oregon. He is the author of Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey (2016).

Michael Ziegler

Michael Ziegler, D. Min., is interested in the skillful means intersecting meditation, psychoactives, somatic practice and meaning making. He is continually tinkering to re-contextualize ancient wisdom practices for modern explorers. He has lead explorations in expanded states of consciousness for 40 years.

Michael is founder of numerous institutions including: the Chaplaincy Institute, Seventh Heaven Body Awareness Center (Namaste Yoga), The Ketamine Training Institute, The Green Earth Foundation, and the Guild of Guides. He has been on the faculty of Naropa University, The University of Creation Spirituality, The Chaplaincy Institute, and the California Institute of Integral Studies. 

His current initiative seeks to disseminate  the unique contributions of the psychedelic Guild of Guides through www.theguidingpresence.com.

Shamil Chandaria

Dr Shamil Chandaria OBE is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing at Oxford University. He has multi-disciplinary research interests spanning computational neuroscience, machine learning and artificial intelligence. His PhD, from the London School of Economics, and an MA in Philosophy from University College London where he developed an interest in philosophy of science and philosophical issues in biology, neuroscience, and ethics. 

In 2018 Dr. Chandaria helped to endow the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University, an interdisciplinary research institute focusing on the most important issues facing humanity. In 2019 he was a founder of the Centre for Psychedelic Research, in the department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London, a neuroscience research institute investigating psychedelic therapies for a number of conditions including treatment resistant depression. He is also funding research on the neuroscience of meditation at Harvard University and Berkeley, University of California.

In 2022 Dr Chandaria was awarded a British OBE for services to Science and Technology, Finance and Philanthropy. He is also a long-term meditation practitioner. 

Tyler Alterman

Tyler Alterman is an entrepreneur & nonprofit leader who is interested in the research and advancement of the good life. Currently, he is a cofounder of Fractal University in New York. Previously he has built startups (Reserve, The Think Tank), grown social movements (Effective Altruism, Reducetarianism), run cognitive science research in and out of academia (Yale, UChicago, Metamorphic Group), and participated in a lot of weird performance art. His current interests include the social role of the clown, Vajrayana, coparenting communities, the vast possibilities of nonverbal communication, and finishing a series of near-term science fiction novels.