In summer 1986, a crowd of 20 people gathered in San Francisco to witness a humanlike figure burn along the shore and ponder the importance of creative expression.
Four decades later, the Burning Man movement and its annual arts festival are large enough to take over an entire desert—and attract some of the biggest names in tech and Hollywood.
A new HBO docuseries, The Man Will Burn, premieres Thursday, July 9, and examines the annual counterculture celebration in Nevada. The four-part project follows Burning Man from its humble roots and examines the new challenges faced at its current scale.
Here’s everything you need to know about Burning Man, its founders, and why the movement still resonates today.
What Is Burning Man and Its Annual Festival?
Burning Man consists of “a thriving worldwide community of artists, makers, and community organizers,” according to the official Burning Man Project website.
Rooted in countercultural themes and the celebration of creative expression, Burning Man members follow 10 core principles that serve “as a projection of the community’s ethos as it developed organically in the desert, and a set of cultural behaviors reflecting shared values.” These tenets include radical self-reliance and expression, decommodification, and respect for the environment (a.k.a. leaving no trace).
Burning Man is most often associated with its annual weeklong festival—though Burning Man dismisses that connotation and calls it a community and global cultural movement.
Since 1990, it’s taken place in Black Rock City, Nevada, a temporary community set up every year in the Black Rock Desert. The event typically spans the week before Labor Day, including the holiday.
Rather than gathering for music and entertainment, Burning Man attendees create art installations or performances, usually centered around an annual theme, or get involved in a camp or village on the playa, as community involvement is encouraged.
And, there are hardly any vendors, so attendees, or “Burners,” must bring everything they need for their time there and pack it all out themselves. The festival’s name is a reference to the celebration’s climactic event on the penultimate night, in which a large human effigy known as “The Man” is symbolically burned.
When Was Burning Man First Held?
The first Burning Man was held June 22, 1986, on Baker Beach in San Francisco.
Friends Larry Harvey and Jerry James built a crude 8-foot effigy out of scrap lumber and asked a couple of their friends to transport it to the beach. Harvey was inspired to start a new version of himself following a divorce, with the Man serving to symbolically let go of the past, per journalist Harrod Blank.
There, Harvey and James doused the figure with gasoline and set it ablaze, quickly drawing a small but enthusiastic crowd.
“And I looked out at this arc of firelit faces, and before I knew it I looked over and there was a hippie with his pants on his head and a guitar standing there, materialized out of the murk,” Harvey recalled. “And he started singing a song about fire. Now I’m not exactly a hootenanny kind of guy, but it seemed like the thing to do, and we started singing.”
According to Harvey, a female onlooker even ran up to the burning creation and held its hand.
Burning Man returned to Baker Beach for the next three years, with the effigy growing to 40 feet tall and more onlookers—including the local authorities—taking notice. Prohibited from burning the Man because of the potential fire hazard, Harvey moved the ceremony to its Black Rock location for the first time.
The festival continued to grow in size and scale and now attracts more than 70,000 attendees each year. Burning Man has only been canceled twice: in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the festival was held virtually.
Do Any Celebrities Attend Burning Man?
A number of notable entertainment figures have attended the annual festival, per W Magazine. They include socialite Paris Hilton, singer Katy Perry, actor Susan Sarandon, and model and TV host Heidi Klum. Sarandon has made frequent appearances and, in 2015, helped spread the ashes of late counterculture icon Timothy Leary across the Nevada desert.
Some of the world’s wealthiest tech moguls have also been spotted at the Black Rock City desert gathering, including Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
What Happened to Burning Man Co-Founder Larry Harvey?
Harvey, an artist and philanthropist, authored the 10 principles of Burning Man in 2004 as a way to unite his growing community of followers under the Burning Man Regional Network.
Harvey designed the effigy and selected the themes for the annual festival every year until his death in 2018, according to the Burning Man Project.
Who Oversees the Burning Man Festival Now?
The Man Will Burn features interviews with Marian Goodell, who has served as CEO of the Burning Man Project and the annual festival since 2013.
She oversees more than 120 employees on the Burning Man staff and an operations budget of approximately $50 million, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Goodell, whose age hasn’t been shared publicly, earned her undergraduate degree in creative writing from Goucher College and a graduate degree in photography from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She first attended Burning Man in 1995, when she worked as a project manager for a software development firm.
In a February 2026 editorial for the Reno Gazette-Journal, Goodell dismissed the perception that Burning Man is merely a party or spectacle and likens it to a “civic experiment” bringing together people of varying backgrounds.
“Participation in Burning Man does not provide answers for a divided world. It does offer the opportunity to experience something the world is hungry for. A way of coming together that does not require consensus,” Goodell wrote. “A space where participation creates belonging. A reminder that connection is something we make, not something we wait for.”
Watch The Man Will Burn starting July 9 on HBO Max
The first episode of The Man Will Burn debuts Thursday, July 9, at 9 p.m. ET on HBO, with subsequent parts premiering weekly at the same time through July 30. All four episodes will be available to stream on HBO Max upon their release.
The docuseries follows Burning Man “through several years of unprecedented turmoil,” including the COVID-19 pandemic and heavy rains that left thousands of attendees stranded in 2023 because of impassable, muddy conditions, according to a news release.
Tyler Piccotti joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor and is now the News and Culture Editor. He previously worked as a reporter and copy editor for a daily newspaper recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors. In his current role, he shares the true stories behind your favorite movies and TV shows and profiles rising musicians, actors, and athletes. When he's not working, you can find him at the nearest amusement park or movie theater and cheering on his favorite teams.
