Gregg Dugan -Writer in Residence, Las Casas de la Selva, Patillas, Puerto Rico, March 2026
Gregg Dugan is a writer, performer, and lifelong explorer whose work moves across oceans, stages, ecosystems, and stories. In 1974, he co-built the research vessel Heraclitus, a 140-ton Chinese sailing junk in Oakland, California, and went on to serve as captain for seven years, logging over 50,000 miles of deep-sea and coastal voyaging and research across the Pacific, Caribbean, Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. Along the way, the crew called in the ports of more than forty nations, often performing as the theater ensemble Studio III.
Dugan’s path continued through a wide range of cultural and ecological work. In 1980, he became director and general manager of Les Marronniers, a conference center and farm near Aix-en-Provence, France, where he hosted workshops, conferences, rehearsals, and performances while also managing orchards and working as a director, actor, and writer with the resident theater ensemble. He later toured internationally with the Theater of All Possibilities in the early 1980s. In 1985, he moved to Texas, where he served as general manager, then CEO and president of the Caravan of Dreams performing arts center in Fort Worth, contributing to its theater, music, and creative programming, and performing in over twenty productions as part of the Caravan Repertory Company. During this time, he also chaired the Fort Worth Main Street Arts Festival for four consecutive years.
From 1991 to 1993, Dugan lived on-site at the Biosphere 2, working as a tree crop specialist. He participated in field collections for the rainforest and ocean biomes and managed the rainforest greenhouses, continuing his engagement with living systems at a planetary scale.
Afterward, he founded Two Birds Productions, producing video work across diverse locations including Puerto Rico, Santa Fe, London, Egypt, New York City, Vancouver Island, and the Sonoran Desert. He wrote The Missing Links in 1998, and later completed Books I–V of the Human Race Series in 2023, a long-form exploration of human experience through narrative, place, and reflection.
Dugan is currently writer-in-residence at Las Casas de la Selva, Patillas, Puerto Rico, for a three-week writing residency, using this time in the rainforest to deepen his ongoing exploration of narrative, place, and the human condition. His presence brings a rare depth of lived inquiry, where decades of movement across disciplines converge within the immediacy of the forest.
Dugan and 3t share a long history with the Institute of Ecotechnics that stretches across landscapes and decades, from working side by side in the organic fruit orchard at the ranch in Santa Fe, NM, to time spent together in the forest at Las Casas more than twenty years ago studying trees and coqui frogs as field leaders on Earthwatch expeditions. Their paths have continued to intersect through a shared commitment to learning by doing, grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction.
Both artists carry a deep reverence for performance, philosophy, and the unfolding of ideas through action. Their reunion at Las Casas now feels less like a return and more like a continuation of a conversation that has never really stopped.
Gregg Dugan’s website: 2birdshrs.com
Books I–V of the Human Race Series in 2023
Related links:
www.rvheraclitus.org
https://eyeontherainforest.org/related-ecotechnic-and-cultural-projects/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theater_of_All_Possibilities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravan_of_Dreams
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250703-how-the-biosphere-2-experiment-changed-our-understanding-of-the-earth
www.eyeontherainforest.org
