Flaming Lotus Girls

Flaming Lotus Girls is a female-driven collaborative art group that creates large-scale fire art. Founded in San Francisco, California in 2000, they built their first sculpture, the Flaming Lotus Sr, for the Burning Man arts festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Their pieces incorporate steel, stainless steel, copper, glass, wood, and light, and incorporate fire ranging from a 2-inch (51 mm) flicker to a 150-foot (46 m) blaze. Their name is a nod to the Lotus flower which can thermoregulate heat control, and is a symbol in many Asian cultures representing feminine attributes such as elegance, beauty, perfection, purity and grace.

While they include all genders, one core mission of the group is to provide an open and supportive culture promoting volunteer contribution and leadership opportunities for women. Members who regularly attend meetings can have input in designing, building, operating and playing with the large-scale work that is created, in a leadership style called do-ocracy; in short, if one wants to see something happen, they must take the initiative to do it.