The 2021 AfterBurn: Illuminating The Great Unknown

Before we dive into the joyful act of rebuilding and celebration, it’s important to understand how the heck we all got here. The impulse, perhaps, is to imagine all the things to come as we emerge and plan Waking Dreams. But to jump ahead without acknowledging our collective experience is like skipping the part of the story where all that juicy character development happens.

We do this by sharing our stories. As a global community, this is how we learn.

Welcome to the 2021 AfterBurn — the retelling of our year, as experienced by many of Burning Man Project’s teams and departments.

Explore stories, learnings, and lessons — applicable to anyone interested in creating community-led experiences in the global Burning Man community and beyond.

Last year, without our city in the desert and so many other key Regional Events, we saw the culture burst forth, propagate, and morph in so many unanticipated but perfect ways.

In 2021 Burning Man was everywhere. As always, but even more so during a year without Black Rock City, it was our mission to support the myriad expressions of the culture that emerged as a result.

You built Art No Matter What. We supported artists to create works of art that rose in multiple cities around the world.

Burners gathered in oh so many ways. You came together to build and explore wildly inventive virtual experiences. As a global community, we safely hosted community gatherings closer to home, including a handful of Regional Events.

You advanced important community projects. We advanced our internal and community work around Radical Inclusion, Diversity, & Equity. Working with the community, we ideated and prototyped ways to make our desert city radically more sustainable, and did much-needed work on our Northern Nevada properties. Burners learned together, built community, and hatched new projects in Burning Man Hive.

We shared stories and cultural conversations. Together we hosted Global Activation calls, an ArtSpeaks series, held convenings, and ran campouts at Fly Ranch. We shared stories on the Burning Man LIVE podcast, and even published a book.

And, of course, we burned the Man.

Read the full 2021 AfterBurn here to discover all of these stories, and a multitude of other ways the dedicated teams at Burning Man Project facilitated and extended Burning Man culture in 2021.