Michael R. Heim is a writer and lecturer in the Humanities who has been teaching at several schools in Southern California including the University of California at Irvine, Mount St. Mary's College, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and California State University Long Beach. His classes range from Sophocles to Shakespeare, from Abraham Lincoln to George Orwell, from Freud and John Locke to Mark Twain. He is also a musician who plays and teaches piano as well as a teacher of Tai Chi in Redondo Beach (ongoing classes outdoors since 1989, www.TaiChiRedondo.com).

Mike Heim conceives his writing as trans-national philosophy. His commissioned articles have appeared regularly in magazines in Austria, France, and Scandanavia. A sample of recent articles are on the front page. He was a Fulbright scholar for three years in Europe where he travelled extensively, studying Heidegger at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau and social theory at the Freie Universitaet Berlin. He earned a Masters in Philosophy from Northern Illinois University and a doctorate in Philosophy from the Pennsylvania State University (1979). His first job "out of the gate" was teaching in a Humanities program at Missouri Western University where he was a tenured professor. He translated a major book by Heidegger and wrote three books of his own. As friend of Ernesto Grassi and member of the Zurich Discourses, he returned to Europe, Scandanavia, and Asia over 20 times for dialogues with Europeans, Asians, Scandanavians, and South Americans.

From 1995 to 2002, he taught graduate and undergraduate classes in digital media at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he earned the Great Teacher Award. His teaching at Art Center included hands-on design work with avatar 3D worlds on the Internet and other forms of virtual reality. In 2001, he was awarded the first UC-wide Digital Cultures Fellowship at the University of California at Santa Barbara. From 2002-05, he advocated a large-scale virtual-reality project for international outreach called "avatar diplomacy," but, even after dozens of presentations around the world, practical support for the project never emerged on an institutional level.

Michael Heim's philosophy was nourished by Western and Asian influences. During graduate studies, he came under the influence of the St. Louis Hegelians. Through professors such as Michael Gelven, Donald Verene, Joseph C. Wu, and James Wayne Dye, he felt the power of comprehensive thinking that was not then in style among mainstream Anglo-American academics. Countering Anglo analytics, the St. Louis Hegelians cultivated expansive horizons and humanistic learning, all transmitted through the genial scholarship of Albert William Levi who was for many years professor at Washington University in St. Louis and who taught Gelven, Verene, Wu, and Dye. Also in St. Louis was Walter J. Ong, who encouraged and fostered the first drafts of Heim's Electric Language, the first book-length study of electronic text. At Penn State, his graduate professors were John M. Anderson, Stanley Rosen, Joseph Kockelmans, and Henry Johnstone Jr., all proponents of what was then called Continental Philosophy.

In Europe, two other strong influences came from professors Hermann Gundert and Heribert Boeder in Freiburg i. Breisgau. The friendly mentor Hermann Gundert, cousin of Herman Hesse and teacher of Greek classics, treated a wide range of topics addressed by classical scholarship. Heribert Boeder, later in Braunschweig near Berlin, demonstrated the power of Hegelian dialectic in addressing contemporary topics (beginning with the daily newspaper). Ernesto Grassi, the Italian humanist and scorcerer of rhetoric, was also a big influence, as was the classics (Greek and Roman) professors at Tulane University in New Orleans, R. M. Frazer and the philosopher Edward G. Ballard.

Since 1989, Michael Heim leads weekly classes in Tai Chi, Meditation, and Chi Kung -- practices learned from Asian teachers in Southern California who transmitted detailed bodywork that helps balance the Western lifestyle. Michael Heim has taught these practices many times in in public venues like Beach Cities Health District and El Camino College, as well as his own school of Tai Chi Redondo outdoors in Redondo Beach - www.TaiChiRedondo.com . Throughout, his life partner Joanna Popdan Heim has been a continual source of strength and delight. Their son Mike Heim works for an international systems firm in El Segundo, California, and has a daugher Eris Catalina Heim.