STORY FOR A LIVING

(First Person) “I once rode in a homemade submarine through the canals of Copenhagen with a member of the Danish Royal Navy and a madman to go visit an engineer who just finished building a walking house.  I helped assemble a hands-on science museum in Turkey during an airport bombing and an attempted military coup before escaping to the Monk Islands. I directed a crowdsourced, abstract musical aboard art rafts made of trash while crashing the Venice biennale after crossing the Adriatic Sea. I watched from the Seine as Notre Dame burned on my birthday. I’ve performed Russian butoh in subzero temperatures wearing a pig’s spine and improvised a ten-minute performance art piece featuring the audience in an abandoned copper mine in Finland as part of a nationwide centennial celebration of the country’s independence. Also I do weddings. I've helped intentional communities set their intentions, helped social justice initiatives find their footing as they reach for support, and helped researchers present the story found in their findings. I’ve also written and performed hundreds of shows, songs and poems for audiences at home and abroad, all the while learning more and more that there is indeed something that unites us all and it is composed primarily of the small, specific and weird. This is a field of study which I have come to call Applied Poetics.”

—Benjamin Burke

(Third Person) As a writer, designer, performer and poet, Benjamin Burke helps scientists, artists and community builders find their voice and use it.  Informed by an interdisciplinary background in the performing arts, visual arts, music and large-scale community-based projects, Benjamin has implemented his self-described approach of Applied Poetics for communities in the United States, Italy, Finland, Taiwan, India, Nepal, Chile, Tasmania and Antarctica. Recent projects include Sunlight, a new film and story studio for science advocacy; Dhun, a novel humanist living development project in Rajasthan, India; and Embrace Global, which ships its innovative portable incubator system in response to humanitarian emergencies worldwide.

Benjamin’s work has been exhibited at the California Academy of Sciences, the Exploratorium, Chabot Observatory, the DeYoung Museum, the SFMOMA Koret Visitor’s Center, Google’s Curiosity Camp and the Spectra Lunar Mission at Lunares Research Station in Pila, Poland. He is a 2013 TED Fellow and his poems have been published in Garbology: Our Love Affair with Trash and the Turkish literary journal Buzdokuz.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Universal Design from the University of California at Davis — a self-directed degree which incorporates environmental design, visual merchandising, graphic design, costume design, photography, fine art and early childhood education.