About Dan
Our hearts know a more beautiful world is possible. We might realize it through conscious cultivation of connective experiences, inspiring stories, and community.
Enlivening and connective experiences expand our sense of what’s possible to know and to feel. Stories help capture felt-knowings into narratives so they can live on through shifts of perspective. New realities are born this way, and then upheld by communities so they can be further expanded and stepped into by others. I’ve come to believe in this process as transformative for individuals, communities, and society.
I’ve dedicated my life to it.
I’ve produced hundreds of events: a 50K+ person festival, woodland retreats, plant medicine ceremonies, industry conferences, ecstatic dance parties, death dinners, hackathons, breathwork, immersive theater, a cowboy space rave, NFT art galleries, and everything in between, managing resources ranging from a few pizzas to $1M+ production budgets.
When I’m not telling stories through immersive arts and experiences, I’m crafting them with words. I started writing and editing for my high school newspaper when I was fourteen, kickstarted an underground paper in college, ran a cannabis legalization-focused publication with 400,000 email subscribers, and most recently and importantly, co-founded Foster, a collaborative writing collective.
The last decade of my life was spent instigating and cultivating various communities. I’ve co-founded three community-first businesses for which I’ve raised $50M+ and had two exits, including an IPO, and I’ve helped build three intentional co-living communities in Brooklyn: 57, Oasis and Haven.
For the next ~decade, I’m focused on discovering how communities might become decentralized, co-owned and self-sustaining. If we can figure out this cycle end-to-end, I believe we’ll be able to do anything, together. Foster is on this journey today and it’s where I spend the majority of my time, but I hope the insights we glean will be broadly applicable and I’m actively applying them to local community work too.
More important to me than any particular pursuit or achievement is my daily practice: a wakeful moment-to-moment recognition of what life offers and a cultivation of the courage, presence, acceptance, and gratitude to engage with it wholeheartedly. I view this practice as a lifelong journey and it resides at the center of every event, experience, story and community I inhabit.
