LLC PROJECT STAFF
Behind every great Man stand the women and men on the Senior Staff. If you were having a party at your house, these people wouldn't relax and have fun: instead, they'd be in the kitchen cooking food or moving amongst your guests emptying ashtrays. As diverse and individual as the functions they perform for the event, they work harder than most mortals, so the citizens of Black Rock City can relax and have a great time.
Along with Larry Harvey, the following 5 individuals are the members of Black Rock City LLC, the entity that takes responsibility for the management of Burning Man. You can find out more about the LLC here.
Crimson Rose - Danger Ranger - Harley Dubois
Marian Goodell - Will Roger
Crimson Rose
Managing Art Director
Crimson was a pyromaniac long before she met the Burning Man. When she attended her first event in 1991, she set the man on fire and has been producing the release of the Man ever since. Crimson makes sure everything goes boom at the right time, and works to help people create art and destroy it safely. This includes the Fire Conclave, in which 500+ fire performers surround the Man on Saturday night, and previously, the monthly Beach Burns in San Francisco. When she's indoors, she serves as Burning Man's Administrative Director, overseeing tickets, merchandise, registration and office procedures.
photo: Karie Henderson
Prior to finding her way into this tailor-made position, Crimson was involved in the arts. In school, she majored in theater, and worked as a fine art model and dancer for 27 years. She is fascinated with the way interactivity and art mesh at Burning Man, and feels it has changed the atmosphere of performance & art. "When art provokes one to interact without thinking, art has taken a giant leap in evolution."
Harley K. Dubois
Director of Community Services & Playa Safety Council
As Director of Community Services, it is Harley's job to put her ear to the ground, listen to what participants want, and make it happen. DPW builds Black Rock City; Harley fills it in. Her responsibilities include placing all services, camps and villages, managing ingress and egress, managing the volunteer process, and overseeing Playa Information Services, Greeters, Burning Man Recycling, Earth Guardians, the Lamplighters, the Bus Depot, Town Meetings, and many staff meetings and functions. As Director of the Playa Safety Team Harley oversees the Rangers, the Gate and Perimeter, and the Emergency Services Department. She enjoys using her creative problem solving skills in an environment typically steeped with bureaucracy and tradition. Harley hopes to someday return to her first love, oil painting, but for now, Burning Man is her canvas. Her favorite thing about Burning Man is the theme camps, which are both artistic and accessible, and the quickest way for people to get involved.
Harley has long been an arts aficionado: as a teenager, she attended the High School for the Performing Arts in Montclair, New Jersey, where she studied acting, dance and opera. She holds a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts and feels most influenced by her first two years of study at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Like Marianne Singleton in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, she came to San Francisco 15 years ago to visit a friend and never left. She first learned of Burning Man in 1991, while living in a household populated by Cacophony Society members. She decided to make the trek to Black Rock City on a spur-of-the-moment decision, and has been working with the organization ever since. She has also worked as a San Francisco firefighter, teacher, personal trainer and aerobics teacher.
photo: supersnail
Marian Goodell
Mistress of Communications
If Burning Man is an embodied being, Marian is its voice. Known to many as the Mistress of Communication, Marian communicates to participants through the Jackrabbit Speaks internet newsletter, and oversees information dissemination through the Black Rock Gazette, the Burning Man Journal paper-based newsletter, Survival Guide and What Where When on-site events guide, and works with developing technology and communications tools with the web, extranet and other tech teams. She oversees Media Mecca, interfaces with the press, and is heavily involved in government relations. In addition, she manages all legal and business and accounting aspects of the festival.
She's known for doing all this while sporting some sort of cat regalia in celebration of her affinity with felines. Marian holds a BA in creative writing from Goucher College in Baltimore, and with large fabric-based, figurative cyan-o-type prints finished an MFA in photography from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. She has previously done sales and public relations, and was working as a project manager for a software cum web development firm producing ford.com when she first arrived as a participant at Burning Man in 1995. She has been in her present role with the project since fall of 1996. Her first love and escape from work is her two sweet-tempered kitties.
Danger Ranger
Ambassador, Director of Genetic Programming
Danger Ranger is the legendary protector of our desert society. Some say he's the seventh son born of the scion of a seventh son. Others claim he possesses near borderline supernatural powers, including the ability to bi-locate and appear at two places simultaneously. This seems plausible, given his penchant for pervading the playa. In 1992 he founded the Black Rock Rangers, an institution patterned on the Texas Rangers and their historic role as guardians of a dispersed frontier society.
Beyond the Black Rock Desert, Danger is known to his friends and co-workers as Michael Michael. He joined the Project in 1990 and he oversees the security and survival of the Burning Man community. He also created the first Burning Man mailing list/data base, produced the first issue of the Black Rock Gazette, established the Burning Man Archive, and drove the first art car to the Black Rock Desert. In 2001 he visited regional communities during his Tour of America as an ambassador for Burning Man. In addition, Michael functions as the guiding light of San Francisco's famous Cacophony Society—"a randomly gathered network of free spirits united in pursuit of experience beyond the mainstream." He has a strong interest in the mysteries of time, space and consciousness along with an engineering systems background in computers and robotics. His Silicon Valley career began with Fairchild Semiconductor just a few years before it gave birth to Intel. After 1984, he served as a robotics consultant to Apple Computer and later engineered the rise (and fall) of Jasmine Computer Systems. Always riding the edge, he contributed to the Mondo2000 house in Berkeley and wired Wired Magazine's first office in San Francisco. His wide range of experiences includes having been a combat veteran in Vietnam and a federal fugitive in the United States. Other past activities include involvement with the machine performance group Survival Research Laboratories.
Throughout the year, M2 lends his guidance and wisdom to navigate Burning Man into the future. His official title is Director of Genetic Programming and he performs his best work at 3 AM.
Will Roger
Director of Nevada Relations & Special Projects
Will Roger builds Black Rock City, and comes to us from Rochester, New York, where he taught photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. As a teacher he was known to be patient, saturnine, and subversive. He naturally attracted a group of devoted students. The title of his course, "In Search Of the Mystical Image," expresses the character of his work. Vapor trails of motion in these portrait studies seem to blend body and spirit, and this, in turn, suggests Will's person.
His prepossessing presence combines with a serenity of character. Will has a way of seeing the large picture, of grasping the greater scope of things around him, while, all the while, remaining planted in the present moment. He is an excellent cook, a disarming host, and a knowing connoisseur of life's varied pleasures. He is also mischievous. While patrolling the perimeter of our camp's circle in 1995, he'd speak to motorists who threatened to invade our central plaza. Mostly they were locals, he recalls, in pickups sporting gun racks. "You may not want to go in here," he would tell them, as if imparting an intimate confidence, "there's is a girl who's pretty wild and she's on a motor bike. Her father," he would add, "is an attorney." Without a further question, he informs us, they would turn around drive away. In 1998 Will was the head honcho while building our city, and worked on both the permit and required Environmental Assessment (EA). Additionally, he established the first Gerlach office for Burning Man in an old jail. Currently, he is the chief of staff of the DPW. In 2001, Will and the DPW began development of the new property at Black Rock Station. 
