Benjamin Burke

Artist, Brainstormer, Change Agent, Designer, Idea generator, Inventor, Musician, Performer, Producer, Writer/Editor

Ben Burke (b. 1974) is an Oakland-based, multi-disciplinary performance artist, director, poet and story consultant who produces and performs unusual shows in unusual places at home and abroad and builds whimsical contraptions out of found materials. As a story consultant, he helps individuals and organizations discover and develop thematic personalized stories and performances for various events and productions. Recent clients include Camp Curiosity, The Crucible, Storied Haven, Symbiosis and Sublime Boudoir. He has been the artist in residence at SFMOMA, the California Academy of Sciences, Recology’s AIR program at the San Francisco dump and the Dream Community in Taipei, Taiwan. His latest piece, Page-Turner, is currently on display at the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio. Burke has given poetic lecture performances at the DeYoung Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, cofounded both the Stars & Garters Theatre Company and Apocalypse Puppet Theater, is a TED Fellow and occasionally teaches art and woodworking to kids at the San Francisco Day School and the Randall Museum. An avid collector of lost treasures, Burke puts his Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, on public display annually at San Francisco’s Edwardian Ball. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Universal Design from UC Davis, a self-directed degree combining fine art, graphic design, visual merchandising, costume design, photography, landscape architecture and early childhood education.

I am an obsessive story detector and engineer, in constant search of surprise, seeking to manifest the unexpected and continually fascinated by how people and things function and fit together.

Our brains have evolved to find stories in everything- to fill in the blanks as quickly as possible to arrive at a definitive conclusion so we can take immediate action. It's no wonder we're all so stuck in our ways. The plus side is that we also TELL stories to each other. The problem is that we are built to latch onto things. We are constantly unknowingly imprinted upon and yet we act as if our thoughts and actions are completely under our own control. It usually takes some kind of catastrophic event for us to reconsider our ways. I like to think of storytelling as our one golden tool for possibly avoiding such catastrophes.

Storytelling and humour

Math