Rate My Professor Jeff Burke

Jeff Burke is Professor and Chair of the Theater Department as well as Associate Dean for Research and Creative Technology at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. A three-time UCLA alumnus, he holds a B.S. in electrical engineering, an M.S. in electrical engineering, and an M.F.A. in film, television, and digital media, all from UCLA. Since joining the faculty in 2001, Burke has created, produced, managed, programmed, and designed experimental performances, films, new genre art installations, and creative technologies for over two decades. His research and creative work centers on the intersections of technology and creative expression, particularly how artists can shape emerging technologies to serve expressive and social goals.

In 2004, Burke co-founded the Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance (REMAP), a collaborative initiative between the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. From 2006 to 2012, he served as area lead for participatory urban sensing at the NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. He was co-principal investigator and application team lead for the Named Data Networking project, funded by NSF and an international consortium, from 2010 to 2022. Burke is currently principal investigator for the Innovation, Culture, and Creativity project. He developed and led the Future Storytelling Summer Institutes in 2014 and 2018-2020, addressing virtual production, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence. Notable productions include the experimental immersive musical Xanadu in Spring 2025, which used AI and Unreal Engine to generate digital scenery from audience input; A Most Favored Nation, an augmented reality immersive theater experience; and Entropy Bound, a full-length comedy fusing dramaturgy and machine learning. Burke has also contributed to projects such as OpenPTrack, an open-source multi-camera tracking system; cheLA collaborations since 2003; Francis Ford Coppola’s Distant Vision workshop; the TFT/Swarovski Waterschool documentary; and Recoding Innovation shorts on ethics in science and engineering. His work has received support from grants including the Google Focused Award, Trust for Mutual Understanding, and Omidyar Network’s Future of Data Challenge.