Luis Eduardo Luna was born in Florencia, Colombia, in 1947. He has a B.A. from Universidad Complutense de Madrid (1972), an interdisciplinary Master from Oslo University (1980), and a Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Religion Stockholm University (1989). He received a Fellowship of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, appointed for a study of the ethnobotany and ethnomedicine of the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon (1986), and the title Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa, from St. Lawrence, Canton, New York (2002).

He was an associate of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University (1987) and was elected Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London (1989). He was an Assistant Professor in Anthropology (1994-1998) at the Department of Anthropology of Santa Catarina Federal University (UFSC) in Florianópolis, Brazil. He retired in 2011 from the Department of Modern Language and Communication at the Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki.

Besides publications in various journals, Dr. Luna is the author of Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon (1986), a co-author with Pablo Amaringo of Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman (1991), and co-author with Slawek Wojtowicz, Rick Strassman and Ede Frecska of Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys Through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies (2008). He is also a co-editor with Steven White of Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon's Sacred Vine (2000, enlarged second edition 2016).

Dr. Luna has lectured worldwide on indigenous and mestizo shamanism and has been a curator of visionary art exhibits in Europe, Latin America, the United States, and Japan. He is the Director of Wasiwaska, Research Center for the Study of Psychointegrator Plants, Visionary Art and Consciousness, Florianópolis, Brazil (www.wasiwaska.org). From June 2022 he is also an Honorary Research Fellow of University of Exeter, England.

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