Jessica Rajko named Acting Associate Dean of Academic and Faculty Affairs

Jessica Rajko has been named Acting Associate Dean of Academic and Faculty Affairs for the College, effective Oct. 13, 2025. Most recently, she served as Associate Chair of the Maggie Allesee Department of Theatre and Dance.

Rajko - an artist/scholar at the intersection of dance and computing - has been published in the Dance Research Journal, Journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, Dance Education in Practice, and British Computer Society, along with chapter contributions in dance, computing, and digital humanities.

"Jessica Rajko will be a wonderful Acting Associate Dean. She is highly organized, detail oriented, and knowledgeable in academic and faculty issues," said College of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts Interim Dean Kelly Young. "She is, admittedly, a data and spreadsheet nerd and that is an important quality for this kind of administrative work. I am excited to work with her."

Rajko's research deals with complex digital systems to examine how they influence and are influenced by dance. Her most recent Decoding Digital Bodies project critically examines how human movement - especially dance - shapes the code, metadata, and digital archives of Boston Dynamic's Spot robots and Choreography SDK. The project is co-led with Varsha Iyengar and is currently in collaboration with roboticists in Brown University's Humans to Robots Laboratory.

In addition, Rajko's work has been presented at UToronto's BMO Lab for Creative Research, UMich's Performing Arts Technology Seminar Series, Harvard's Digital Futures Consortium, UPenn's Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and University of New Mexico's ART Lab.