Swan Dao, PhD, is an experience designer, psychotherapist, and peace activist, as well as the founder of the Institute of Devotional Arts. After studying philosophy and theology in Melbourne, Oxford, and Chicago, Swan worked as a supervisor at the University of Cambridge, where they wrote their thesis on individual and social transformation. As a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, they published several articles on environmental ethics and comparative religion such as Animals in Christian and Muslim Thought, The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics (Routledge, 2018) and Albert Schweitzer: The Life of Reverence, Animal Theologians (Oxford University Press, 2023). Seeking more embodied and imaginal forms of knowledge, they trained at the Jacques Lecoq school of physical theatre, earned certificates in tantra yoga, breathwork, and hypnotherapy, and founded an organisation that pioneered human rewilding in France. Committed to building a more peaceful, caring, and creative world, Swan has been guiding individuals and groups for over a decade and has led seminars, workshops, and retreats in a dozen countries on three continents.

Kythe Maryam Heller is a poet, essayist, interdisciplinary artist, and scholar completing a doctorate at Harvard University in Comparative Religion with a secondary field in Arts, Film, and Visual Studies. Kythe holds an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and a BA in English Literature from Reed College. She is author of the poetry collection Firebird (Arrowsmith), editor of the anthology The Soul Conveys itself in Shadow, writing and inter-media works including Immolation, Thunder Perfect Mind, and Rite of Spring, film and installation work presented in the US and Canada, and critical studies published by Cambridge University Press, Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, and Harvard Divinity School Graduate Journal. Kythe is also the founder of Vision Lab, a socially-engaged art and research collective in the future of the human spirit, editor-in-chief of Forecast Journal, and a faculty member of the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College.

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Aaron Finbloom, PhD, is a philosopher, performance artist, and pedagogue, as well as the founder and director of The Deep Play Institute and co-founder of The School of Making Thinking. Aaron earned a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia University and an MA in Philosophy and Art from Stony Brook University. His work involves designing performative “conversation pieces” for transformative inquiry that seek to aesthetically expand the scope of philosophical, academic, and psychotherapeutic pedagogies. He has presented these works internationally at conferences, exhibitions, and theaters such as The School of the Art Institute (Chicago), Maschinenhaus Kulturbrauerei (Berlin), and UNAM (Mexico City). The scores of such works have been published in multiple platforms including “Propositional Attitudes” (Golden Spike Press, 2018) a book of performance scores which showcased at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. His research into philosophical-performative pedagogies has been published in journals such as Performance Research and TENOR. Aaron currently teaches philosophy at The City College of New York and at the University of Portland. 

Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer, poet, and farmer, as well as the founder and director of Sky Meadow Institute, an organization dedicated to emergent ways of thinking about meaning-making and to advancing systems-based thinking about the things that matter most. ​Brendan holds a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Vermont and an MDiv in Religion and Art from Yale University. He is the author of the 7-volume Metamodern Spirituality Series and of Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics (ARC Press, 2023). He hosts the Metamodern Spirituality podcast and helps run retreats dedicated to exploring spiritual frame work beyond postmodernism. Brendan’s work seeks to find productive ways to bride the divide between science and spirituality, and to developing sustainable systems for life to flourish.