Dionysus: Echoes of an Ancient Future

Chiara Baldini

Chiara Baldini is a raver, researcher and freelance curator from Florence, Italy. She investigates the evolution of the ecstatic cult in the West, particularly in Minoan Crete, ancient Greece and Rome, contributing to anthologies, psychedelic conferences and festivals.

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Chiara Baldini is a researcher, author, speaker and freelance curator from Florence (Italy). She investigates the evolution of the ecstatic cult in the West, particularly in Minoan Crete, ancient Greece and Rome, contributing to anthologies, psychedelic conferences and festivals. She was the program curator of Boom Festival’s cultural area Liminal Village from 2010 to 2023. She has co-curated the anthology “Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine” investigating the intersection between the feminine principle and altered states of consciousness. She is currently a PhD candidate at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in the Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness program. She lives between Italy and Portugal and she expresses her deep love for music by often playing as DJ Clandestina. Stay in contact with Chiara via email on [[email protected]]([email protected]) or Instagram here [@iamalwayschiara](https://www.instagram.com/iamalwayschiara/)

Ruby Reed

Ruby co-founded Advaya in 2015 and Earthed in 2023. She is a community builder, curator, creator and lover of water fascinated by how we relate to the world around us.

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Ruby Reed is passionate about bringing people together in offline and online spaces that reframe how we see the world around us, and our role within it, so we recognise our ecological relationality, fall more in love with life, and actively participate in its ecological and spiritual regeneration. She is a community builder and a key figure in the UK alternative education space, where she takes an integrated and holistic approach with her work spanning a vast ecosystem and network from climate to psychedelics. Together with her sister Christabel Reed, Ruby has founded a number of organisations. Ruby is the co-founder of transformative education and experience platform Advaya (founded 2015), as well as the co-founder and Director of Initiative Earth Charity and its Ecosystem Restoration and nature skills platform Earthed (founded 2023) and climate action campaign EcoResolution (2018-2022). She is a core team member of Medicine Festival since its inception in 2019, where she curates and hosts the talks stage and speakers across site and part of Be The Earth Foundation’s Flow Funding network. In 2018-2020 she led wellbeing across environmental action protests in the UK, setting up marquees and programmes in key sites across London as well as retreats for activists and changemakers. Ruby has had the enormous privilege of learning directly from wisdom carriers, philosophers, indigenous leaders, academics, visionaries, economists and scientists from around the world. Her main interests are metaphysics and consciousness and how our relationship with these shapes our worldviews and cultures as a species. The idea of “transform your mind, transform your world” guides her work. She is passionate about the ocean and has been a yoga practitioner, diver and swimmer since childhood. Between 2014 and 2021 she taught yoga as a qualified yoga therapist, led nature-based retreats, and was also a competitive freediver. These days she simply enjoys swimming on the surface, which keeps her connected and happy. Before starting her own projects, Ruby was an advisor, researcher and writer for leading art collectors in the UK and completed two Masters degrees in History of Art at Edinburgh University (ideal beauty and the body in the dawning of the enlightenment c.17th) and The Courtauld Institute (Latin American countercultures c.20th). She was set on academia and due to start a PhD at Oxford before having a change of heart and took a role in Private Sales at the auction house Christie’s in Private Sales (2012-2015).