Biography

Max Burnett grew up on a goat farm in Oklahoma. He studied Playwriting and Directing at the University of Oklahoma, earning both a BFA and an MFA. After a year of working on Broadway in New York(the original production of Will Rogers Follies as well as others), Max decided to move to Los Angeles and pursue a career in Film and TV.

Max comes to UVU with over 20 years of film production and screenwriting experience. He wrote and directed the feature film POSSUMS (Sundance, 1998) and achieved national theatrical distribution through Lionsgate. He sold several feature film scripts and TV pilots. He created the action-adventure TV series, THE TROOP, for Nickelodeon, which he served as Executive Producer for all 40 episodes. For that series he won a Writers Guild Award and was nominated for second one the following year. He graduated from the Writers’ Guild Showrunning Training Program and shortly afterwards and wrote on several TV shows including WENDELL & VINNIE and THE OTHER KINGDOM (the latter on which he ran the writers’ room). He most recently served as Line Producer for the Emmy nominated Netflix series ALEXA & KATIE as well as the award-winning Paramount+ reboot of iCARLY. During those jobs he oversaw crews of 130-170 people at a time, managed multimillion-dollar budgets and helped navigate its cast and crew safely through filming during the Covid pandemic.

Throughout his time in Los Angeles, he lectured on writing for TV and Film as well as Producing. He was one of only 4 writers chosen by the USC Hollywood Health & Society to travel to South Africa and India to share and collaborate with local TV and Film creators the similarities and differences between our industries.

Max is thrilled to join UVU’s amazing Digital Media program as their newest Assistant Professor, focusing on cinematic storytelling classes.

Education

Teaching

Presentations