Chosen Family

2025

The concept of Chosen Family centers around our autonomy to choose communities and families that support our authentic selves, and that allow us to participate in the immediate and global environments around us. Bahiyyah Maroon, PhD describes a chosen family as being “made up of people who have intentionally chosen to embrace, nurture, love, and support each other regardless of blood or marriage.” Choosing your family can be a radical and self-sustaining act, but also a gentle and life-affirming one. Our piece Chosen Family provides a place to sit, sprawl, sleep - laugh, cry, take photos - with your chosen family. Inside the drawers are little envelopes with chosen family messages for participants to keep.

We are proud to have been chosen as a Burning Man official mentee art project for the Renewables for Artists Team (RAT) in 2025.

Chosen Family 2025

Lead Artist: Drewry Hanes

Contributing Artist: John Winks, Teddies Camp

We owe many thanks to the incredible people at ARTery, Teddies Camp, RAT, and on the Playa who helped make Chosen Family happen, and re-happen this year. The Playa presented incredible challenges with record wind storms, rainfall, and technical issues. We built, re-built, soldered our electrical on Playa, reinforced structures in the dark, and managed to salvage our art project for folks to enjoy safely through Sunday. It represented, perhaps not what we envisioned, but certainly the best that Burning Man brings to the world. Thank you, thank you.

Meet the Team

  • Drewry Hanes

    LEAD ARTIST

  • John Winks

    LNT DIRECTOR

    Contributing Artist

  • Steve Szumski

    BUILD DIRECTOR - NEVADA

  • Teddies Camp

    Contributing Artists

FUNDING

Thank you to everyone who made Chosen Family happen this year!

Our connections make us who we are.

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