The Art of Leveling Up: Your Small Project Can Have a Huge Impact

There comes a time in the evolution of (almost) everyone who goes to Burning Man: the day the timer goes off. Their number is called. A disembodied voice echoes in the halls of the brain and informs you “Now is your time to bring something.” 

It’s an exciting call. Though wildly daunting, the prospect of transforming an idea into a reality is hard to resist. If you’re feeling like 2025 might be your year to bring a creative vision to life in Black Rock City, but doubts are creeping in about whether you’re up to the challenge, we have good news: leveling up your participation is easier than you might think. 

We’ve gathered some great examples of new small theme camps, art, and even a mutant vehicle to prove that you—yes, you—can bring wonderful, small things to life in Black Rock City.*

*Most of the camps featured in this article gift edible and drinkable offerings to BRC. But there are many kinds of gifts to give; food is just one of many.

Undaunted by Distance

Meet Tini Rich, co-lead of Priscilla, a fabulous pink theme camp hailing all the way from Australia. Traditionally Priscilla offers dance parties and events to the playa all week. But iIn 2024, Tini and her campmates knew they wanted to bring a taste of home to the desert. “We wanted to do a sausage sizzle, which is quite iconic to Australia,” she explained. Hurdle one: sourcing authentic Australian sausages in Nevada (Spoiler: Australian sausages are not the same as American hot dogs.) Undeterred, one of Tini’s campmates set up a sausage sizzle test kitchen at her home Down Under. Once she had perfected the recipe after serving sausage to countless dinner party guests, the camp found a Bay Area butcher to craft hundreds of bangers to spec. Last year on playa, Priscilla served up over 300 authentic sausages at their inaugural sausage sizzle, complete with grilled onions and traditional tomato sauce.

Priscilla’s Level-Up Tip: Be creative in sourcing authentic materials; geography doesn’t have to limit your vision!

(By the way, if you’re a theme camp planning to serve up grub in BRC, make sure you read about any requirements here first.)

Bringing a theme camp and food offering to playa from another far-off place Vienna, Austria, Dominik Karr and the campers of Schnitzel Camp encountered some obstacles of their own. Eager to serve the eponymous Austrian specialty to their fellow Burners, the first-year theme camp made plans to rent a kitchen truck. A week before Burning Man, the plot thickened: they discovered their rental was a scam. But with the help of sympathetic on-playa neighbors who lent Schnitzel Camp a freezer, a shade structure, and an entire kitchen setup, the schnitzel went on. Over the course of the week, the 12-person Schnitzel crew gathered every night at midnight to pound and fry and bread pork and vegan wiener schnitzel for the playa. To accompany the 1,000 servings of schnitzel they made last year, the Viennese campmates hand-carried 10 magnums and 26 bottles of Austrian white wine across the world to quench the thirst of new friends in Black Rock City, serving the wine in glass stemware (real glass!). 

Proof positive Europeans have their priorities straight.

Schnitzel Camp’s Level-Up Tip: Community support can save the day. Get to know your neighbors in the lead up to Black Rock City. You may be able to help each other make your dreams come true, or help each other out when you’re thrown a curveball.

It Doesn’t (Necessarily) Take a Village

Robin Eno is another tiny theme camp cooking superstar. The accidental one-woman show behind the first-year theme camp Camp Stone Soup found her on- and off-playa calling during a serendipitous moment at Burning Man 2023. 

Sheltering in her RV during one of the year’s infamously torrential rainstorms, Robin tuned into BMIR radio via her car radio and heard a DJ say a line that changed her life: “If there’s anything that you can do for your neighbors, please do.” 

Inspired, Robin sprung into action, cooking up vegan stir-fry and oatmeal for her fellow Burners. Then and there, she decided to return in 2024 to form a mini theme camp that cooked dinner every night for hungry playa wanderers. 

When her two other campmates dropped out of Burning Man in July right before the event in 2024, Robin didn’t let that stop her. Undeterred, she became a one-woman feeding theme camp cooking one-pot meals and serving 75-100 grateful people per night. 

But that wasn’t all for Robin. After quite literally hearing the call over the BMIR airwaves during the rainstorms of 2023, her vision involved cooking for those who needed a hot meal off-playa. 

An early retiree and full-time RV traveler, Robin wanted to give back via a “mobile food ministry” to serve people experiencing homelessness and decided to come back in 2024 to treat Black Rock City 2024 as her testing ground: “Camp Stone Soup was my preparation for being a mobile feeding camp and feeding the poor,” Robin explains. In the lead-up to her first burn as a placed camp, Robin stress-tested her gear and recipes, serving food to small groups and gathering feedback.

After Camp Stone Soup’s debut, Robin took her kitchen beyond BRC a few months later. In December 2024, she served hot meals to people experiencing homelessness in a San Bernardino church parking lot, inspiring a local non-profit and Loma Linda Community College to coordinate a health fair alongside her gifted meal. “Burning Man was one step,” Robin said. “My ultimate goal was this.”

Camp Stone Soup’s Level-Up Tip: Use Burning Man as a testing ground for your ambitions and dreams that extend beyond the playa. And, know that one person can –and will–make a meaningful impact at Burning Man. 

Chase Orton is also no stranger to tiny-but-mighty camps. He is the mastermind behind another first-time theme camp, Stoop. In 2024, Chase used his box truck-turned-tiny home with a big window cut out of the side as his theme camp HQ. Inside, Chase and his crew of three campmates slung 800 grilled cheeses, griddled 800 blueberry pancakes, and poured and shook too many coffees and cocktails to count. 

Chase – an experienced Burner and first time theme camp organizer – says he envisioned transforming his mobile tiny home into your favorite local Black Rock City neighborhood hangout. The key to making that dream a reality was to empower campmates and neighbors to co-create the experience with him, inviting others to come into the tiny home and take a turn hosting too. Reflecting on the smash hit of Stoop, Chase muses, “It’s crazy that the best idea I ever had was cutting a hole in the side of a box truck.”

Stoop’s Level-Up Tip: Repurpose what you already have…your tiny home box truck can become a theme camp HQ. And rather that only serving, empower others to co-create by inviting participation.

It Doesn’t Have to Cost a Fortune

For Elliot Kirk, Whitney Wilhelmy, and Kat Ebert, Gen Z co-leads of the theme camp Neodebauchery, their playa story began in 2020 with a serendipitous Facebook Marketplace find too good to pass up: a cheap geodesic dome. 

The group bought the dome and took it for a spin on the playa in summer 2020 during the pandemic. Despite the daunting logistics of starting and running a theme camp on the budget of 20-somethings, they knew they wanted to bring Neodebauchery to the big leagues of Black Rock City in 2022, gifting a variety of offerings to the playa, including a catty comments coffee bar in the mornings, and a temple devoted to the worship of Steve Buscemi, open 24/7. 

“We were definitely very scared of the idea but loved it at the same time,” Whitney recalls. “There’s nothing quite like going to Burning Man with a community you love and are invested in.” For Neodebauchery, the juice is worth the squeeze.

Neodebauchery’s Level-Up Tip: Start with what you can afford. Work with the budget you have today and scale up gradually.

Listen to Whitney and Kat speak about their experience as the next generation of Burning Man on the Burning Man LIVE podcast episode “Rising Sparks: Bridging Burner Generations”:

Small Art Can Have a Huge Impact

While these theme camps were cooking away and fueling participants’ adventures, artists on the open playa and throughout the city offer much needed catharsis. Among them was Mila Timofeeva, who brought her first art piece to playa in 2024 called “A Journaling Moment.” 

Anyone who found Mila’s installation at the trash fence was invited to sit down, consider the limitless expanse of open playa before them, and journal about moments of serendipity and joy. Inside the journal was the code to a safe containing sticker versions of Mila’s three silk flags hand-painted with loving messages from the Universe, also affixed to the trash fence. Writers were invited to take two stickers, one for themselves and one to gift to a stranger. 

In an act of self-reliance through and through, Mila sewed the flags herself and brought all materials for her piece – including telescoping poles, a folding table, and two folding chairs – and all her personal gear in two suitcases all the way from Germany, making the last leg of her journey to playa on the Burner Express bus. Mila’s small piece struck a chord. “I have two fully filled journals with people’s stories,” she marvels. “For me, it was a little bit as if I created space to have deep conversations.” 

Mila, who is not a professional artist, brought her first art piece in her third year in BRC, but she has been dreaming about making something since her first: 

“The first time I went to the Burn, I thought, I really want to bring something and I really want to contribute, and I really want to be an artist at the Burn. And then it was just the whole journey of, okay, what can I bring? What inspires me and what can be something that engages people that they communicate with, and that they maybe carry with themselves later.” 

Artist Mila Timofeeva’s Level-Up Tip: Simple ideas can create deep connections. And, if designed thoughtfully, everything can fit in two suitcases. 

Matt Garrity is the Boston-based lead of the art trio Pretty Good Collective. The collective’s first Burning Man art piece, Burner Industrial Dome, was an homage to the creative reuse of iconic Burning Man objects. Intrigued by the glowing repurposed water cubes of 2023’s beloved artwork BitCube, in 2024 Matt challenged himself to build a structure entirely from the infamous yellow-topped black storage bins Burners use to store and transport all manner of gear. 

“My thought was, what if we focus specifically on using things we already have? The bins and everything was tensioned together with ratchet straps,” Matt explains. “I held everything placed with zip ties kind of intentionally. That may not have been the best way to do it, but I wanted to bring items essential to making Black Rock City to the forefront.” 

Burner Industrial Dome is art with a ripple effect. Post-Burning Man, Matt transformed the bins into Burning Man starter kits, stocking them with essential Burning Man supplies like ratchet straps, zip ties, cable ties, and lights. Currently, he’s in the process of giving the bins away to anyone in the Boston-area who requests them.

Matt Garrity’s Level-Up Tip: Use materials and supplies already in your Burning Man arsenal. And consider designing a pay-it-forward afterlife of your project to extend its impact beyond the playa.

Upcycling the Mutant Vehicle of Your Dreams

When siblings Hilary Somers and Seneca Spurling founded Word Play Café with a handful of friends in 2022, their reasons were personal: to avoid losing the New York Times word game daily streak established during the pandemic. 

Two years on, Word Play Café has grown to a 40-person camp, still intimate by BRC standards. Word Play Café is a space where word nerds can gather over a morning cup of coffee to play classic word games like Boggle, Scrabble, and Bananagrams along with custom-made, Burning Man-themed word crosswords before heading out there to get weird. 

In 2024, Word Play Café decided they were ready to take their show on the road. They repurposed an old mutant vehicle, rechristening it Fun Across (a play on the first clue in a crossword puzzle, “one across”). 

Now, anyone on the open playa can go head-to-head in a round of custom, playa-themed Wordle or other playa-themed word games displayed on Fun Across’ LED screen.

“The most rewarding thing about it is everyone who comes in who loves it and is just so happy,” Seneca says. “We were worried; we were like, Will there be more than 10 people? Or even 10 people who also think this is cool? But no, tons of people do and they love it.” 

Word Play Café / Fun Across’s Level-Up Tip: Bring what genuinely excites you to playa. Who knew how many playa crawlers love word games! And rather than building a mutant vehicle from scratch, consider adopting and adapting someone else’s retired MV.

What’s the moral of all of these fantastic stories? To bring something to Black Rock City, all it takes is a willingness to dream one size bigger.

Across countries and continents, these pioneering theme camp leaders, artists, and newly minted mutant vehicle captains all share the same radical, can’t-keep-it-down, ingenious, and impassioned creativity and resourcefulness. Against the odds, they all found a way to bring their dreams to life.

Listen to Event Operations Director Charlie Dolman, DMV Council Lead Chef Juke, and Head of Placement Level talk about how Burning Man Project is cutting away the red tape and making it easier to bring your Black Rock City dreams to life in 2025 in the Burning Man LIVE podcast episode “De-bureaucratizing Your Burn”:

These stories remind us that the magic of Black Rock City doesn’t require you to be a technical wizard or to have scores of collaborators or a limitless budget. You don’t even have to live remotely close to Black Rock City! All you need is scrappy ingenuity, a collaborative ethos, and the desire to contribute whatever lights your fire.

In a city founded on dreams and built by human hands, these Burners prove one playa truth beyond measure: the only limit to your participation is your imagination.

What are you going to bring? 

 Cover image of members of micro-theme camp Stoop, 2024 (Photo courtesy of Chase Orton)