Jeffrey Ventrella is a developer of virtual worlds and artificial life, with a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab. A gifted artist at a young age, Jeffrey discovered programming at 26, and has since applied visual language to many areas of software engineering, including scientific data visualization at Syracuse University. He has taught at Syracuse University, Tufts, and the University of California in San Diego, and has published chapters and presented his artificial life work internationally. In 2008, Jeffrey taught the Building Virtual Worlds course at the Centre for Digital Media.

In '97 Jeffrey became co-founder and Principle Inventor of the virtual world, There.com, where he was the lead designer for avatar-centric communication. Later he served as Senior Developer at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, where he invented Flexies, FollowCam, and avatar-related technologies. Jeffrey has worked at Adobe Systems on Acrobat 3D, and developed the home page for NASAImages.org while working at the Internet Archive. His interactive gems can be found at www.Ventrella.com