Laurie Lane-Zucker is founder and president of the Triad Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Massachusetts, devoted to advancing a new vision of citizenship for a fast globalizing, and ecologically challenged world. Prior to founding Triad, Lane-Zucker was the co-founder and executive director of The Orion Society, which publishes Orion Magazine, OrionOnline, and Orion Books, hosts the Orion Grassroots Network of over one thousand grassroots organizations around North America, and was an important pioneer of "place-based" education, a rapidly spreading new pedagogy of community. 

In addition to his executive roles at Orion, Lane-Zucker was an editor and contributing writer for Orion magazine, which received 30 total nominations, as well as the 2004 Prize for General Excellence, from the Independent Press Awards, and acted as series editor for two book series, the Nature Literacy Series, which includes David Sobel's Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities, and the New Patriotism Series which includes In The Presence of Fear by Wendell Berry, The Open Space of Democracy by Terry Tempest Williams, and Citizens Dissent: Security, Morality and Leadership in an Age of Terror by Wendell Berry and David James Duncan. Citizens Dissent received the 2003 Intellectual Freedom Award from the American Library Association. Through Triad Books, Lane-Zucker has edited and published a new work by David James Duncan entitled God Laughs and Plays, a profound and timely exploration of American fundamentalism and politics. The book is a bestseller, and has won both the PNBA Book Award and Pushcart Prize.

Lane-Zucker has organized over seventy conferences on a wide range of environmental, cultural, and political themes, including the 1996 conference, "Watershed: Writers, Nature, and Community" with then-Poet Laureate Robert Hass, held at the American Library of Congress, which drew 3000 participants, the 1999 "Fire and Grit Millennium Conference" at the National Conservation Training Center, and more recently, "Artful Advocacy: Building a New Movement for Responsible U.S. Global Engagement," with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Nathan Cummings Foundation, held at RBF's Pocantico Conference Center. Lane-Zucker has organized programs with several dozen leading colleges and universities and worked closely with a host of local and national organizations and institutions.

Lane-Zucker was the Vermont Library Association's John Swan Intellectual Freedom Lecturer for 2005. In that capacity, he lectured domestically and abroad on such subjects as "A New Vision of Citizenship for a Fast Globalizing and Ecologically Challenged World," "The Post-9/11 Crisis of Citizenship," and "Citizenship and Education." Recently, Lane-Zucker presented a talk entitled "Metaphorical Politics" at the 2006 Bioneers Conference (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth).

Lane-Zucker's early professional work was in film. He was national marketing manager for Orion Classics, the foreign and art film division of Orion Pictures Corporation (now Sony Pictures Classics). During his tenure at Orion Classics, the company won Best Foreign Film Oscars in consecutive years for Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (1988) and Pedro Almodovar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1989). Lane-Zucker also worked on a number of other important films, such as Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, Claude Berri's Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, Louis Malle's Au Revior Les Enfant, Claire Denis' Chocolat, Bruno Nuytten's Camille Claudel and others.