
2025 Garden States Contributors
More to be announced soon!
Kathleen Harrison (US / Hawaii)
Kathleen Harrison, MA, is an independent scholar and teacher of ethnobotany. She focuses particularly on the way that various native cultures perceive nature, and how they exhibit that in story, ritual and healing. Psychedelic plant and mushroom rituals are part of that relationship to nature.Since the 1970s, she has done recurrent fieldwork in Mesoamerica, the Amazon Basin, the West Coast subcultures, and Pacific islands, and is a published author and photographer. She is the president of Botanical Dimensions, a non-profit organization, which she founded with her former husband, Terence McKenna.
Mike Jay (UK)
Mike Jay is an author and historian who has written widely on the history of science and medicine, particularly on the mind, consciousness and psychoactive drugs. His books include High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture (2010), Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (2019), and Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (2023).
Alison Pouliot
Alison is an ecologist and professional environmental photographer who has worked with fungi for three decades. She is actively involved in teaching, research and conservation, but is mostly in the undergrowth among fungi.
Neil Logan (US / Hawaii)
Neil Logan is a researcher, educator, and land steward specialising in medicinal and entheogenic plants, with a focus on taxonomic enigmas and ethnobotanical mysteries. Drawing inspiration from the cultural and ecological wisdom shared with him through decades of research and travel,
Graham St John, PhD (Aus / UK)
Graham St John, PhD, is a vibeologist specialising in the anthropology of transformational events, movements, and figures. Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press) is the latest among his books, which include Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT, Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance, and FreeNRG: Notes from the Edge of the Dancefloor (Commonground, 2001).
C. Scott Taylor, PhD (US/AUS)
Scott is an author, academic, teacher, student of the “Ageless Wisdom”, storyteller, scientist, founding director of the Cetacean Studies Institute, expert on Dolphin-Assisted Therapy, Permaculture designer and teacher, alternative architecture builder, lightshow artist, workshop leader, lifelong animal lover and activist, father, ex-pat American now proudly Australian citizen, and psychonaut.
Mark Pesce (Aus / US)
Mark Pesce co-invented the technology for 3D on the Web - laying the foundations for the metaverse - has written ten books, including "Getting Started with ChatGPT and AI Chatbots", was for seven years a judge on the ABC's hit series The New Inventors, founded postgraduate programs at the University of Southern California and the Australian Film Television and Radio School, holds an honorary appointment at Sydney University, is a multiple-award-winning columnist for The Register, writes features for COSMOS Magazine, and is professional futurist and public speaker. Pesce hosts the award-winning 'The Next Billion Seconds' podcast, and recently released the highly-praised, award-nominated series “A Brief History of the Metaverse”.
Harry Pack (UK)
Harry Pack is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores altered states of consciousness, expanded perception, and the subtle architecture of the mind. Through a dynamic practice encompassing painting, illustration, and digital media, he investigates the intersection between psychedelic experience and the inner psychological landscape, using art as a vehicle to explore reality.
Anna Ermakova (UK /Russia)
Anya has a motley background and broad research interests combining nature conservation, ethnobotany, neuroscience and psychiatry, interweaving and connecting these diverse paths through psychedelic science. Deep love for nature and wildlife has motivated Anya to study biology at the University of Edinburgh, while a quest to understand altered states of consciousness has prompted her to specialise in neuroscience and later continued during her PhD in psychiatry at Cambridge, where she investigated the origins of psychosis.
Alex K. Gearin (Aus / China)
Alex K. Gearin (PhD) is a cultural anthropologist specialising in the intersections of mental health, neo-shamanism, and psychedelics. Much of his research has focused on ayahuasca, including for his recent book Global Ayahuasca: Wondrous Visions and Modern Worlds (Stanford University Press, 2024). The book explores how the emotional and sensory dimensions of ayahuasca practices intersect with modernity and globalisation, based on ethnographic research on the ground in Australia, Peru, and China.
Kayla Greenstien (Aus / Canada)
Kayla Greenstien is a PhD Candidate at the University of Sydney, researching the use of touch and theoretical underpinnings of psychedelic-assisted therapies.
Mohammad Reza Mirzadeh
Mohammed Reza Mirzadeh has come from a horticulture background. He spent almost all his working life (over thirty years) in the mushroom industry, mainly in Iran and Australia, holding positions in production, QA, and farm management. In the last twenty years, parallel to his positions within the industry, he has been conducting workshops and mushroom courses discussing compost/substrate production and growing methods for Agaricus and various Oyster mushrooms.