Joseph Bardin
Joseph Bardin, who publishes as Joe Bardin, is Director of Communications for the Coalition for Radical Life Extension and People Unlimited, and President of Relativity Writing, the messaging strategy and writing firm he has run in Scottsdale, Arizona since 1996. He is an essayist, playwright, and speaker whose work makes the case for unlimited human lifespans.
The Coalition for Radical Life Extension is a Scottsdale-based nonprofit that provides education, resources, and community for super longevity. Joe directs its communications, including those for RAADfest (the Revolution Against Aging and Death Festival), the Coalition's annual gathering of longevity scientists, clinicians, and advocates, which he describes as the largest super longevity event in the world. Read Healthy to a Hundred: Joe Bardin of Coalition for Radical Life Extension On 5 Things You Need to Live a Long, Healthy, & Happy Life.
He also speaks at RAADfest, where his talk Nurture Your Niche: A Communication Strategy for Outliers examined how radical life extension advocates can expand their audience without diluting their message. People Unlimited, the Scottsdale community founded in 1982 by our James Strole, Bernadeane Brown, and Charles Paul Brown, is the community whose founders Joe credits as the inspiration for his three decades as an immortalist.
In 2026, Joe coauthored with James Strole The Gospel of Longevity: The Shortcut Out of Stress, Sickness and a Life of Survival, published by Mark Victor Hansen Library. His own essay collection, Outlier Heart: Essays from my Life as an Immortalist, was published by IFERS Press in 2019. Read Outlier Heart: What Do You Call a Non-Fiction Essay Collection Most Might Consider Fiction?
He earlier coauthored with Bernadeane Brown Living Without Death: The Experience of Physical Immortality. His essay Drinking From the Air, which examines how humanity has adapted emotionally and intellectually to death and what that accommodation has cost, appears in The Transhumanism Handbook, edited by our Newton Lee.
Joe's literary nonfiction has appeared in Louisville Review, Interim, Image Journal: Good Letters, Rock & Sling, and The Dramatist. Read Outlier Heart and In the Name of Not Repeating in Eclectica, Trenton into Time in Superstition Review, Ladder in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, In the Vortex: Death, Dating and Resurrection in The Good Men Project, and Do's and Don'ts for Discussing Immortality with Friends and Family on Transpire. Read his Contributions on Medium.
A member of the Dramatists Guild, Joe writes plays that carry the same questions onto the stage. His full-length comedy-drama Seeing Maya, a love story set in Tel Aviv during the 1991 Gulf War, was produced by Order Chaos Theater Company at the Herberger Theater Center's Kax Stage in Phoenix in January 2024, and was presented as a reading directed by Raghad Almakhlouf and featuring Lisa Hodsoll at the Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festival in Washington, DC in March 2026. Read Cross-Border Collaboration, his 2026 essay in The Theatre Times about developing the play.
His comedy Exit Dust, in which a family confronts a future technology that treats dementia, was produced by Theatre Artists Studio in Scottsdale in 2022, and his comedy Love Disorder was performed at the Herberger Theater Center's Kax Stage in November 2014.
His short plays have been staged in Phoenix, Tucson, and Kaiserslautern, Germany, and developed at venues including the Queens Short Play Festival, the Rogue Theater Festival in New York, and Chicago Dramatists. His scripts, among them Infinity Mirror, which recasts the mythology of immortality in light of modern age-reversal science, are catalogued on the New Play Exchange.
Through Relativity Writing, which he founded in 1996, Joe has provided messaging strategy, web content, ghostwriting, and book development, including cowritten and ghostwritten books on self-growth, autobiography, investing, and adoption, for corporate clients including Motorola, Procter & Gamble, LifeLock, Honeywell, Intel, DreamWorks Studios, Cigna, and Onyx by J.P. Morgan, and for nonprofits including Arizona State University, Thunderbird School of Global Management, and the BHHS Legacy Foundation.
For ASU's W. P. Carey School of Business, he wrote research features including Sustainability in the Supply Chain: A New Competitive Advantage and The Family Way: How Socioemotional Wealth Drives Decision-Making. His business journalism for InBusiness Magazine includes Ori Eisen: Sharing the Cure for Online Fraud and The Immigration Effect: Boom or Bust for Business, and his features have appeared in Phoenix Magazine, The Arizona Republic, and Phoenix New Times. His commercial work has won an American Business Award and been published in the AR100 Black Book and the Print Regional Design Annual.
Joe earned his B.A. in English from Vassar College in 1989, graduating with general and departmental honors and playing varsity basketball. He is a 2001 alumnus of the Community of Writers workshop (then the Squaw Valley Community of Writers) and of the Tom Jenks Writing Workshop. Raised between Jerusalem and Trenton, New Jersey, he later lived in Washington, DC and Tel Aviv, and is a native Hebrew speaker. He volunteers with the Desert Mission Food Bank.
Visit his homepage, LinkedIn profile, Amazon author page, and New Play Exchange profile. Follow him on X.