Burning Man Project
company organizing the Burning Man festival

The Burning Man Project is an American organization that annually plans, manages, and builds Burning Man on the dry lake of the Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada. The company coordinates the year-round, behind-the-scenes work needed to build and remove a temporary city of 80,000 people.
Burning Man ticket sales provide a multi million-dollar budget for the organization. These revenues help the organization obtain required permits from the Bureau of Land Management, rent portable toilets and equipment, secure medical, fire, and law enforcement services, and cover other organizational expenses.
History
1986 to 1996
In the first ten years of Burning Man's history, from 1986 to 1996, the annual event was fully anarchical and run largely by the Cacophony Society. Due to an increased need for structure and planning after a tumultuous 1996 year, Burning Man 97 LLC was formed to run next year's event on May 22, 1997.
1997 to 2010
For the first time, the event was run by a legitimate business; rules were implemented, and the Department of Public Works was formed to oversee the task of setting up a city of 10,000 people. Consequently, 1997 was the first year that the city had a planned layout and a map. The intent of the founders was to dissolve and form a new LLC for each event cycle, as evident by the fact that Burning Man 98 LLC was formed on November 24, 1997; this was deemed entirely unsustainable in the business world, however. On February 4, 1999, Black Rock City LLC was formed as an organization to run Burning Man in the long term, then an event of 23,000 people.
The public source identifies “Burning Man Project” as company organizing the Burning Man festival. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Burning, Project and company.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4921703. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1996, 1997 and 2010.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Burning Man Project” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.