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 community leaders include:
ZACH GREEN
Board Director
Zach has been burning, both regionally and at TTitD, for a number of years and is an experienced builder of burner art. He’s currently the Houston build lead for the “Whirl of Art” interactive burnable art project. He fabricated burning art for “Mermicorn Tower” at Flipside 2018 and built “TETRA” for Flipside 2019/2023 and Burning Man 2019. He also transported and built “momentorium” at Burning Man 2019.
deicy “D-rex” Brown and Andy “Sandor” Brown
Board Director and Houlie Lead (D-Rex)
Board Director and Houpla Lead (Sandor)
This married couple has been burning together since 2016. Together, they have led the Houpla and Houlie theme camps their 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 and as part of the 25 to Thrive team studying how to evolve Burning Man’s Regional Network. They are passionate about helping new people attend Burning Man and acculturating them to burner culture.