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Daniel Pinchbeck
Daniel Pinchbeck is one of the founders of Open City, an art and literary journal, and an independent book publisher. A 1999-2000 Fellow of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, he has written features for many publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Wired, Harper's Bazaar, the Village Voice, and Salon, and has been a columnist for The Art Newspaper of London. Born in 1966, he grew up in New York City, where his father, Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract painter. His mother, Joyce Johnson, was part of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. She is the author of several books, including Minor Characters, a memoir.
Pinchbeck attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, then worked as a magazine editor and journalist. In the late 1990s, he began to study shamanism and the magical plants used in rituals. On assignment, he went to Gabon, in West Africa, and took iboga, a long-lasting psychedelic rootbark, in an initiation ceremony. He continued his study of shamanism by visiting a shaman in Oaxaca, the son of the famous shamaness Maria Sabina; attending a conference on Visionary Entheobotany in Palenque, Mexico; visiting the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada; and going down to the Ecuadorean Amazon to visit the Secoya tribe and take ayahuasca, a visionary medicine. His book, Breaking Open the Head, describes his process of discovering shamanism as a real phenomenon. He is also the author of 2012: The Return of the Quetzalcoatl, in which he explores a profound paradigm shift centering around the Mayan prophecy of 2012 that predicts the end of a society based on materiality and the beginning of a society based on spirituality.
Pinchbeck is also a well-known speaker who has lectured at the Open Center in New York, the Arlington Institute in Virginia, and the Boom Festival in Portugal. He recently survived the rigors of his first appearance on The Colbert Report. |
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