Derek Beres has devoted his life to exposing people to international music, yoga and mythology as a means of creating better individuals and a more understanding global culture. Derek spends his days and nights employed as a multi-faceted journalist, DJ and yoga instructor. He has published five books, and has contributed to dozens of magazines and websites regarding the traditional and digital realms of global music, yoga and health, including Women’s Health, Yoga Journal, National Geographic, Rolling Stone Middle East, Departures, AOL, MTV, Huffington Post, the Village Voice and Relix.

Derek is one half of global music producers EarthRise SoundSystem, which creates innovative contexts for 21st century music and cultures to be explored. The duo’s debut album, The Yoga Sessions, reached #5 on the iTunes World charts, and has helped to introduce the American yoga community to a new way of exploring yogic movement through global sounds. He is the creator of EarthRise Yoga, which he has taught at Equinox Fitness since 2004,  where he co-founded the Sacred Strength EarthRise Yoga School in 2008. Derek’s yoga classes and music have been featured by NBC Weekend Today, ABC Eyewitness News, Fox Business, BBC, and NY1, as well as in print and online by Fitness, Yoga Journal, Boston Globe, AOL’s Spinner, Newsday, MTV, NPR, and PRI.

Alongside David ‘Duke Mushroom’ Schommer in EarthRise SoundSystem, they have remixed a number of internationally recognized artists, including Watcha Clan, Femi Kuti, Novalima, Bombay Dub Orchestra, Nickodemus, MC Yogi, Deva Premal and more. In 2010, he produced InnerVersions: A Six Degrees Yoga Compilation on Six Degrees Records, and has previously produced albums by Vieux Farka Toure and on Australia’s One World Music. He also tours internationally with GlobeSonic Sound System alongside Fabian Alsultany and Bill Bragin. Beres is a regular guest at the legendary Turntables on the Hudson parties, and was a resident DJ of Kollektiv with Karsh Kale. In New York he has DJ’d at Irving Plaza, Cielo, SOB’s, Nublu, Joe’s Pub, Nokia Theater, Webster Hall, Kush and countless others. Over the years he has performed alongside Jamiroquai, Ojos De Brujo, Sidestepper, Brazilian Girls, Yerba Buena, Antibalas, Cheb i Sabbah and more. He also served as the Music Supervisor for the breakthrough documentary, ‘DMT: The Spirit Molecule.’

Alongside writer Dax-Devlon Ross he founded Outside the Box Publishing in 2005. Among the company’s publications are Derek’s Sound Against Flame: The Process of Yoga and Atheism in America, Global Beat Fusion: The History of the Future of Music, Tangled Web: The Best Music Tour You Never Heard Of, Mysterious Distance, a novel, and a book of essays co-written with Ross, A Staircase of Words: Volume 1.

Regarding his work, kirtan master Krishna Das said, “Derek Beres is part reporter and part prophet standing in the middle of the eye of the World Music storm that is raining new musical genres on the Earth today, each one fused by the love of song and spirit.” About his last book, author Daniel Pinchbeck said, “Derek Beres is a terrific writer whose work is replete with penetrating insights and gem-like details … Beres adds a unique perspective to our cultural mix, and Sound Against Flame deserves to reach a large audience.”

In the realm of lecturing, Beres is a powerful and animated speaker; his many appearances include both editions of the progressive Mythic Journeys conference in Atlanta, as well as colleges such as Harvard, the University of Alabama and NYU, and he gave a lecture on the “Gods of Yoga” at ABC Home Carpet in 2007.

In 2001 Beres co-founded EarthRise Arts alongside painter Craig Anthony Miller, and their Infusion parties are known to blur the lines between music venue, art gallery and theatrical performance. In the world of theater, his play Burning Trees was featured in 2002’s Hip-Hop Theater Festival, produced by Danny Hoch.

A 1997 graduate of Rutgers University with a degree in Religion, Beres entwines the mythological with the modern, showing how digital music is the first true global folk music as artists everywhere employ computers in their sonic creations. As NPR stated, it “is not a book about music alone. It’s about a growing worldwide community that’s searching for shared experience without politics or corporate involvement. And it could fill many different slots on the bookshelf.”

Just as Beres is a syncretistic artist, his writing has been inspired by numerous sources. He is a fan of Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Mircea Eliade, and Carl Jung, as well as lyrical writers such as Jose Saramago, John Steinbeck, Russel Banks, Haruki Murakami, and Pablo Neruda. Global Beat Fusion further crosses lines between poetry and academia; pulling from a world of intellectual scholarship, Beres works his studies into daily life in an accessible, thorough and enjoyable manner. Knowing mind and body to be one and the same, his devoted yoga practice translates a wealth of experience onto page, approaching the physical and mental with meticulous care, discipline and fun.