Joan Halifax

Joan Jiko Halifax, born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on 30 July 1942, is an American Zen Buddhist teacher, anthropologist, ecologist, civil rights activist and hospice caregiver, and the author of several books on Buddhism and spirituality. She graduated from Tulane University in 1964 and worked at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University with Alan Lomax from 1964 to 1968. She later received a Ph.D. in medical anthropology and psychology from Union Institute and University, studied the Dogon in Mali and the Huichols in Mexico, and in the 1970s collaborated with her then husband Stanislav Grof on LSD research with the dying, publishing The Human Encounter With Death in 1977. She founded the Ojai Foundation in 1979, the Project on Being with Dying, and in 1990 the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she is abbot and guiding teacher.