Alexander Gardner

I spent most of my childhood in the woods at the edge of the Champlain Valley of Vermont. My childhood ambition was to be a farmer, but I went to Marlboro College to study Art and wound up writing on Philosophy and Religion. After graduating I made several trips to Asia, backpacking in the Himalaya or staying with monks in the recently-cleared jungle of South India. It was a time when a person could slip into Tibet without trouble and go anywhere, hitchhiking or jumping a bus. In between trips I earned a Masters degree in American History from the University of Vermont, where I wrote about Christian Fundamentalism. The topic of my doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan was the so-called twenty-five great sites of eastern Tibet and the triad of great lamas Jamgon Kongtrul, Khyentse Wangpo, and Chokgyur Lingpa. I wrote it in the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library, and was lucky when I finished, in 2006, to land a post-doctoral fellowship at the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center under the legendary Gene Smith. For that I had the pleasure of sitting in the Rubin Museum, and from there I moved up the street to work for Shelley and Donald Rubin, for whom, among other things, I helped create the Treasury of Lives, an on-line biographical encyclopedia of Tibet and Central Asia which I continue to run. For the past 15 years I've lived in New York City and Callicoon, NY with my cryptographer husband Rosario Gennaro, my daughter Matilde and my son Giuseppe.