PHIL COUSINEAU is an award-winning writer and filmmaker, teacher and editor, lecturer, storyteller and TV host. His fascination with the art, literature, and history of culture has taken him from Michigan to Marrakesh, Iceland to the Amazon, in a worldwide search for what the ancients called the "soul of the world." With more than 35 books and 15 scriptwriting credits to his name, the "omnipresent influence of myth in modern life" is a thread that runs through all of his work.

TALKS & TRAVELS: Phil Cousineau lectures frequently on a wide spectrum of topics that reflect his mythic and scholarly journeys, including mythology, movies, writing, beauty, language, travel, sports, and creativity. He has appeared with some of the great thinkers and philosophers of our time, such as mentors Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith. An expert on pilgrimage and meaningful travel, Cousineau also leads small group journeys and writing retreats to sacred and culturally rich places. To learn more, visit: http://www.philcousineau.net/disc.htm

BOOKS: Phil Cousineau's books include STOKING THE CREATIVE FIRES, ONCE AND FUTURE MYTHS, THE ART OF PILGRIMAGE: THE SEEKER'S GUIDE TO MAKING TRAVEL SACRED, THE HERO'S JOURNEY: JOSEPH CAMPBELL ON HIS LIFE AND WORK, SOUL: AN ARCHAEOLOGY, and WORDCATCHER. Other books include BEYOND FORGIVENESS, THE PAINTED WORD, and BURNING THE MIDNIGHT OIL. An expanded edition of Phil Cousineau's travel stories inspired by his decades on the road, THE BOOK OF ROADS, and a collection of Cousineau's own aphorisms and sayings, THE ACCIDENTAL APHORIST, are his most recent books. Cousineau's books have been translated into more than ten languages, and he is a contributor to more than 50 other books.

FILMS: Phil Cousineau's screenwriting credits in documentary films have won more than 25 international awards, and include: A SEAT AT THE TABLE, ECOLOGICAL DESIGN, WAYFINDERS, THE PEYOTE ROAD, WIPING THE TEARS OF SEVEN GENERATIONS, THE HERO'S JOURNEY; and the Academy Award-nominated FOREVER ACTIVISTS.

TV & APPEARANCES: Phil Cousineau is co-writer and host of GLOBAL SPIRIT, Link TV's "internal travel" television series broadcasting on World and Local PBS stations. He has also appeared on CNN, The Discovery Channel, and NFL Films, and more. He has been featured on Voice of America, PRI's The World, CBC's Tapestry, Deepak Chopra's Wellness Radio, and NPR's Weekend Edition. He has been interviewed for stories in TIME and NEWSWEEK as well as the NEW YORK TIMES. He has been a judge for the Emmys, the San Francisco Film Festival, and the PEN-WEST literary awards. Look for his expert commentary and mythic take on film among the special features on several Warner Brothers DVDs. In 2016 he provided on-camera commentary for MAJOR LEAGUE LEGENDS, the Smithsonian Channel and MLB-produced series on baseball's most iconic ballplayers.

CONSULTING: An expert on mythology and film and the "hero journey" structure of screenplays, Cousineau has consulted on film projects for Warner Bros., LucasFilm, and Pixar. He also consults on all types of writing projects, and leads annual writing retreats.

Phil Cousineau lives with his family in North Beach in San Francisco, California. He is currently finishing one book on beauty, a book about Sisyphus, and another on baseball. Learn more about his work at http://www.philcousineau.net.

Huston Cummings Smith (born May 31, 1919) is among the preeminent religious studies scholars in the United States. His work, The Religions of Man (later revised and retitled The World's Religions), is a classic in the field, with over two million copies sold, and it remains a common introduction to comparative religion.

Smith was born in Soochow, China, to Methodist missionaries and spent his first 17 years there. He taught at the Universities of Colorado and Denver from 1944 to 1947, moved to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, for the next 10 years, and then served as professor of Philosophy at MIT from 1958 to 1973. While at MIT, he participated in some of the experiments with entheogens that professor Timothy Leary conducted at Harvard University. Smith then moved to Syracuse University, where he was Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Philosophy until his retirement in 1983 and current emeritus status. He now lives in the Berkeley, California, area where he is Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

During his career, Smith not only studied but also practiced Vedanta Hinduism, Zen Buddhism (under Goto Zuigan), and Sufism for over 10 years each. He is a notable autodidact.

As a young man, of his own volition after suddenly turning to mysticism, Smith set out to meet with then-famous author Gerald Heard. Heard responded to Smith's letter, invited him to Trabuco College (later donated as the Ramakrishna Monastery) in Southern California, and then sent him off to meet the legendary Aldous Huxley. So began Smith's experimentation with meditation and his association with the Vedanta Society in Saint Louis under the auspices of Swami Satprakashananda of the Ramakrishna order.

Via the connection with Heard and Huxley, Smith eventually experimented with Timothy Leary and others at the Center for Personality Research, of which Leary was research professor. The experience and history of that era are captured somewhat in Smith's book Cleansing the Doors of Perception. In this period, Smith joined in on the Harvard Project as well, in an attempt to raise spiritual awareness through entheogenic plants.

He has been a friend of the XIVth Dalai Lama for more than 40 years, and has met and talked to some of the great figures of the century, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Thomas Merton.

Smith developed an interest in the Traditionalist School formulated by Rene Guenon and Ananda Coomaraswamy. This interest has become a continuing thread in all his writings.

In 1996 Bill Moyers devoted a five-part PBS special to Smith's life and work: The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith. Smith has also produced three series for public television: The Religions of Man, The Search for America, and (with Arthur Compton) Science and Human Responsibility.

His films on Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Sufism have all won awards at international film festivals. His latest DVD release is The Roots of Fundamentalism—A Conversation with Huston Smith and Phil Cousineau.