THIS ENGINEER-ARTIST OPENS NEW WORLDS FOR STORYTELLERS.
Jeff Burke
Class of 1999, M.S. 2001, M.F.A. 2010
When youāve created a play called āHomer in Cyberspace,ā received a Google Focused Award on āThe Future of Storytellingā and taught courses entitled āBuilding Virtual Worldsā and āPuppeted Architecture,ā youāre clearly a cutting-edge kind of academic. But although heāll just tell you that he ābuilds things,ā Jeff Burke, associate dean of technology and innovation at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, is much more than that. Burke is a true digital trailblazer, traveling along the boundary between entertainment and digital technology ā and shattering it. He has produced, managed, programmed and designed experimental performances, short films and new genre art installations for almost two decades, working with Intel, Cisco, Google and many others. Now, Burkeās penchant for building things is poised to influence all of cyberspace. He is co-principal investigator for the National Science Foundationās Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, where he will lead a team of UCLA researchers in developing a more robust and efficient Internet for the 21st Century.