Our People

Our editors, transcribers, advisors, digital library team, donors, teachers, and many others are what gives meaning to the Chogyam Trungpa Institute. We are grateful to all these folks for their continuing support!

Advisory Group

Charles Lief

President Naropa University

Charles Lief became president of Naropa University in 2012, He was a student of Naropa’s founder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche from 1970 and is a teacher in that lineage. He also served as Naropa’s lawyer and chair of the board of trustees. Naropa’s mission is to create a more just world by nurturing student insight and awareness, courage and compassion. It is the higher education leader in integrating the contemplative tools of mindfulness and compassion with academic study and service learning. He was the founding president of the Greyston Foundation which provided housing, health care, and employment to thousands of homeless, formerly incarcerated, mentally ill and low-income people in the Northeast. He has been elected to many other boards including current service as chair of the Lions Roar Foundation.

Carolyn Rose Gimian

Executive Director, CTI

Carolyn Rose Gimian is a book editor, an archivist and a teacher of meditation, mindfulness and Buddhism. She is the editor of The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa, Mindfulness in Action and many other volumes of his work.

Carolyn was the founding director of the Shambhala Archives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a major repository of Trungpa Rinpoche’s archival legacy, and she is the Executive Director of the Chogyam Trungpa Institute at Naropa University. Since 2013, she has helped to organize and teach at the Profound Treasury Retreats, presenting Chogyam Trungpa’s teachings in retreat settings. She also teaches extensively online.

Diana J. Mukpo

Diana Mukpo, the wife of the Venerable Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, was born Diana Judith Pybus in 1953 in England. She first saw Chogyam Trungpa at a Free Tibet rally in London. Within a year, she and the Trungpa Rinpoche met and fell in love. They were married on January 3, 1970. A few months later, they left England for North America. They had been married seventeen years when Rinpoche died in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1987.

Diana has had a lifelong passion for horsemanship. She is among a handful of women who ever trained in dressage at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. Today, she continues to train and compete dressage horses at the international level and to teach the discipline of dressage to many students.

In addition to pursuing her own career and raising their five children, Diana Mukpo often accompanied the Vidyadhara when he travelled and taught with him at some seminars and retreats. She is the author of Dragon Thunder: My Life with Chogyam Trungpa. Since Rinpoche’s death, Diana has taught throughout North America and in Europe, presenting both her personal experiences with the Trungpa Rinpoche as well as sharing her knowledge of the Shambhala and Buddhist teachings.

Judy Lief

Judy Lief is a Buddhist teacher who trained under the Tibetan meditation master, Ven. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She has been a teacher and practitioner for over 35 years, and she continues to teach throughout the world. Judy is known for offering insights and practices stemming from the Buddhist tradition as a support for ordinary people facing the difficulties and challenges of modern life. Judy leads retreats and workshops as well as presenting online teachings. She is a senior editor of Chogyam Trungpa’s work and the editor of the three-volume Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma, a compendium of Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings at the Vajradhatu Seminaries.

Jane Carpenter Cohn

Jane Carpenter Cohn, MA, is an Associate Professor and Director of the Naropa Center for Bhutan Partnerships at Naropa University. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Buddhism, Buddhist Psychology, Contemplative Education and the Arts. She works collaboratively with the Royal University of Bhutan faculty in the development of the Bhutan Study Abroad Program, curricular design and implementation of Counseling Programs. As a contemplative artist practitioner and teacher she specializes in Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging. Jane is a Komon in the Sogetsu School of Ikebana.

Carla Marie Burns

Carla Burns, MDiv, is an Instructor in Naropa’s Core College, and Graduate School of Psychology, with an emphasis on the exploration of loving-kindness through the wisdom of the body, emotions, and the elements. She is particularly passionate about the ways in which contemplative practice communities can come to understand and hold multiple ways of being and knowing, and how we embody and utilize space as a means to personal, collective and cosmic liberation. In addition, she is certified Mindfulness Instructor at Naropa University, she co-developed Naropa’s Embodied Mindfulness in Teaching Training program and is the Program Manager for the Center for the Advancement of Contemplative Education.

Hazel Bercholz

Hazel Bercholz was an early student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, having met him in the Bay Area in 1970. In her work as a book designer with Shambhala Publications (which her husband started in 1969), she worked directly with Rinpoche on the design of several of his books. And, she continued this work on his major books until her retirement in 2019.

Hazel has taught Buddhist classes and directed Shambhala Training programs over the years. Now, living once again in Boulder, she teaches classes with Rime Society and on Ocean.

Mitchell M. Levy, MD MCCM FCCP

Mitchell M. Levy MD is Chief, Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine at The Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University. He is also Systemwide Director of Critical Care Medicine at the Lifespan Health System in Providence, Rhode Island. Dr. Levy is Past-President of the Society of Critical Care Medicine (2009). Dr. Levy’s current research interests include translational research in sepsis, and end-of-life care in the ICU. He has authored over 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Dr. Levy is very active in the field of quality and safety. Dr. Levy has been a Shambhala Buddhist practitioner for the past 50 years.

Matilda Perks

Matilda Perks is a Ph.D. student at McGill University who studies the history of Buddhist modernism(s) and Tibetan Buddhism outside of Tibet with a focus on the life and works of Tibetan lama, Chögyam Trungpa (1940-1987), and the development of the Vajradhatu community. She was born into the Shambhala community and has been a practitioner of Buddhist meditation for 25 years.

Ashoka Mukpo

Ashoka Mukpo is a writer and journalist currently living in Berlin, Germany. He is the adopted son of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who taught him to cheer up, be kind, and break the rules sometimes.

The Chogyam Trungpa Digital Library

Carolyn Rose Gimian

Executive Director

Carolyn Rose Gimian is a book editor, an archivist and a teacher of meditation, mindfulness and Buddhism. She is the editor of The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa, Mindfulness in Action and many other volumes of his work.

John Perkins

Digital Library Lead

John Perkins, the Lead for the Digital Library, has had a long career working with museums and archives to bring their collections to audiences in the digital public sphere. John writes:

I am honoured to be part of the team developing the CTI Digital Library. It’s rewarding to be realizing the long held dream of deep and rich access to the mind and heart of Chogyam Trungpa in the form of his recorded teachings, talks, performances and art. I hope the pathways to discovery and the narratives we craft from the collections will be a gateway to understanding, create opportunity for discovery and delight, and inspire many future generations.

Lynn Friedman

Data Manager and IT Lead

Lynn has been a dharma practitioner since meeting Trungpa Rinpoche in 1974. She was a software developer and systems architect for 35 years, working with diverse technologies to build applications for organizations ranging from small startups to large government departments. She started dreaming about the architecture for a digital library of Chogyam Trungpa’s teachings many years ago, and is so pleased that she is now part of the team that is bringing this vision to life.

Warner Dick

Transcription Lead

Warner Dick became a student of the buddhadharma at the New York Shambhala Center in the early 1990s while a graduate student in Psychology at NYU. He also holds a B.F.A from the Rhode Island School of Design. Having previously worked in a technical capacity in photography, film and theater production, as well as experimental psychology, Warner relishes this opportunity to combine his interests, coordinating the Transcription Project and helping launch the Digital Library. Warner lives in Bedford, NY, and teaches at the Westchester Meditation Center.

Anne Seidlitz

Team Member

Anne Seidlitz is a writer who has worked in documentary film and arts and nonprofit development for many years. Films she has worked on have appeared on American Masters, American Experience, Independent Lens, POV, and HBO, among others. Her areas of expertise are American cultural and social history, with a special focus on African American history and culture. Anne’s most recent project, Becoming Frederick Douglass, will be broadcast nationally on PBS in late 2022. She became a student of Chogyam Trungpa in 1982 while still in college, and had the good fortune of attending the final Vajradhatu Seminary he taught, in 1986. She is a senior transcriber and part of the writing team for the Digital Library.

Leandra Ziegler

Team Member

Born to students of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Leandra Ziegler grew up in Nova Scotia, where she currently lives. She trained as a modern dancer and studied creative writing at Skidmore College, graduating with a B.A. in Dance and English. Since then, Leandra has worked as a professional dancer, ESL teacher, and freelance copy editor. In 2019, Leandra joined CTI’s Transcription Project, creating and proofing transcripts of Trungpa Rinpoche’s teachings. More recently, she has also been assisting the Digital Library development team. Leandra is thrilled to be working towards making the wealth of these teachings accessible to so many people.