Burning Man Houston is a regional community of burners and Burning Man attendees supported by Houston Art Collective, a burner-led, Texas-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Please note, we are huge fans of, but not affiliated with, the official Burning Man Project non-profit organization.
What We Do
Our community seeks to burn year-round and to be a friendly, accessible point of entry for anyone looking to attend the Burning Man event and/or explore burner culture in the Houston area.
We specialize in taking new people to Burning Man each year and helping them have a fun, safe, and (reasonably) comfortable experience. To help make this happen, our community supports a theme camp, a community truck providing gear transport to and from Black Rock City, and a mutant vehicle that helps the camp run errands while on playa.
Beyond Burning Man, we gather weekly at our warehouse and workspace, host an annual regional burn and campout, attend other regional burns together, and work on a variety of art-oriented , skill-building projects.
Everyone is welcome to join in and participate in the fun, and we look forward to meeting you!
Our Values
Our community looks to Burning Man’s Ten Principles for guidance on its values. We hold all the Principles dear, but we also place a particular emphasis on the following:
- Radical Inclusion – everyone is invited to join our community. We make a special effort to seek out new people and make them feel welcome.
- Participation – we place a particular emphasis on getting people involved and off the sidelines. Everyone is invited and encouraged to work and play.
- Radical Self-Expression – everyone’s unique gifts and ideas are welcome. That said, we insist gift-givers respect recipients. In practice, this means we work hard to ensure an atmosphere of kindness and understanding where everyone feels valued and appreciated, especially our volunteers.
- Decommodification – we seek to avoid purchasing things in favor of building them ourselves. Part of this is an effort to keep things affordable and open to folks with a variety of means, but it is also an effort to create spaces that are less focused on materialism, consumerism, and brands. Money is not a valid substitute for time, effort, or care in our community.
Volunteering and Leadership
The efforts of this community are largely driven by gifts of time and resources from our volunteers. We have no paid staff or employees. Instead, we have a collection of burners who care deeply about what we do and how we do it. We deeply appreciate these folks as we couldn’t do what we do without them.
Our community leaders are typically our most involved and active volunteers. These are the folks that arrive early, stay late, and sweat as hard as anyone. They do this while also taking on the added responsibilities to help our events and projects run smoothly.
Some of our current community leaders include:
Wanda “WANDER” WARD
Houpla Co-Lead
Wander went to Burning Man for the first time in 2017, loved it, and returned again in 2018 and 2019. She’s a very experienced R/V’er and can walk you through the pro’s and con’s of having a R/V on the playa. She can do the same for golf carts. A registered nurse, Wanda can be found keeping burners patched up so that they can go and re-injure themselves with glee and abandon.
adrienne “Yo! Incident” oliver
Board Director and Houpla Co-Lead
Yo! Incident first attended Burning Man in 2019 and has since jumped in with both feet as a volunteer. She organized our community’s campouts during the pandemic and has stepped up as a board member for our nonprofit and as a co-lead for Houpla this year.
deicy “D-rex” Brown and Andy “Sandor” Brown
Board Director and Houpla Co-Lead (D-Rex)
Board Director and Houpla Lead (Sandor)
This married couple has been burning together since 2016. Together, they have led the Houpla theme camp and its year-round efforts in Houston since 2017. Both D-Rex and Sandor are volunteers with Burning Man’s Camp Support team, with Sandor also serving on the Camp Support Council. They are passionate about helping new people attend Burning Man and acculturating them to burner culture.