John Ennis Dunnicliff

John Dunnicliff passed away on January 25th, 2023 at the age of 83 in San Diego, California.

He was widely known as a kind, generous and loving person by his many friends around the world and by those whose lives he touched. He will be greatly missed by all who knew him.

He has requested “no flowers, no ceremony, no funeral” and has donated his body to science. On this memorial website we can remember and celebrate his life.

John was born and grew up in Derby, UK, but he lived his adult life in Australia, France, and the U.S.

He left England at age 21 with a degree in industrial chemistry to work in water analysis in Australia. After three years, he sailed to the USA and got a job as the marketing director with an international textile company, DHJ Industries, based in New York and Paris, which sent him around the world.

John lived two decades in Paris where he founded a leading agency in Europe, Art Directions, that represented photography luminaries such as Helmut Newton, David Bailey, Art Kane, Barry Lategan, David Hamilton, George Hurrell, Albane Navizet and others, and produced countless campaigns for virtually every French couture house, perfume and cosmetic company.

He continued to Los Angeles where he represented many production companies and directors, and produced TV commercials.

He was a mountain and rock climber and scaled mountains in Europe, America, Asia and Africa, including Mont Blanc, El Capitan and many others.

His caring, kindness and generosity were widely appreciated, especially concerning children. In Los Angeles, as a nature lover, he was troubled to learn that many inner-city children had never been to the sea or the desert. He co-founded a non-profit, New Heights Foundation, and recruited teams of volunteers to bus inner-city and at-risk youth to the desert and teach them rock climbing.

John was a life-long voracious reader. He was working until May, 2022 as a coordinator of a program at a non-profit organization, the San Diego Oasis, where over 400 senior citizens in San Diego County go to the area schools to read with children who have reading problems. He managed a project of collecting thousands of books from publishers and libraries to give to children to continue to read during their summer holidays.

He was a longtime student of Self Realization Fellowship (SRF) and Paramahansa Yogananda. He served at the New York Center, and the beautiful Lake Shrine when he lived in Los Angeles. Later he lived near the SRF Headquarters on Mount Washington, and then near the Hidden Valley Ashram for many years before moving onto the grounds of the SRF Escondido Center ten years ago.