Brooke Burke: Twenty-Five Years of Staying on Television
In the autumn of 2008 Brooke Burke won the mirrorball trophy on *Dancing with the Stars*, and on 25 November that year she announced she had thyroid cancer and would have her thyroid removed. She went back to the same show eighteen months later, this time holding the microphone. That sequence — win, illness, return in a different job — is the whole shape of her career: a performer whose durability has rested less on any single talent than on an unusual instinct for what to do next.
Hartford to Tucson
Burke was born on 8 September 1971 in Hartford, Connecticut, the younger of two children, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Her mother, adopted and raised Jewish, is half Portuguese; her father, of Irish and French descent, left when she was two. She was raised by her mother and an Armenian stepfather in the Jewish faith, and has raised her own children Jewish while also celebrating Christmas.
She attended Sahuaro and Palo Verde High Schools in Tucson and was homecoming queen in 1989. At nineteen she moved to Los Angeles to study broadcast journalism at UCLA — a detail worth holding onto, because the career that followed looked accidental and was not.
The Catalogue and the Camera
Her first national exposure came as a lingerie model for the Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue in the early 1990s, and she went on to cover *Fitness*, *Women's Health*, *Redbook*, *Ladies Home Journal*, *Maxim*, *Stuff*, *Playboy* and *FHM* — a range that spans lad magazines and women's service titles, which is not a common combination and hints at the market positioning she would later monetise directly.
The break was *Wild On!*, E!'s travel series, which she hosted from 1999 to 2002. The format required her to be dropped into a foreign party and be game — she is still remembered for Spain's La Tomatina — and it worked well enough that the show became the network's second-biggest behind Howard Stern.
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From there she became one of American television's reliable hands. She co-hosted *Rock Star: INXS* in 2005 and *Rock Star: Supernova* in 2006 for CBS with Mark Burnett, and hosted *She's Got the Look* on TV Land in 2010, a modelling competition for women over thirty-five.
The defining engagement was *Dancing with the Stars*. She competed in season seven in 2008, won with the professional Derek Hough, beating Warren Sapp — and then returned as co-host alongside Tom Bergeron from season ten in 2010 through season seventeen in 2013, succeeding Samantha Harris. She also co-hosted the Miss America pageant in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2016. Later came *Hidden Heroes*, which she hosted and co-produced from 2016 to 2018, and *I Dare You* on TV Land in 2018. Since 2023 she has hosted *Penn & Teller: Fool Us*, having taken over from Alyson Hannigan in its tenth season. She has also acted, with a recurring role on *Melissa & Joey* in 2014 and 2015, and done video game voice work, including Rachel Teller in *Need for Speed: Underground 2*, a performance that won a Spike Video Game Award.
The Businesses
The more interesting half of the record is commercial. In 2007 Burke founded BabooshBaby.com to sell post-pregnancy belly wraps called Tauts, later expanding it into Baboosh Body. In 2011 she launched ModernMom.com, an online community for mothers, and remains its co-CEO. She released four fitness titles through Sony Pictures in 2012, including *Transform Your Body* and *Brooke Burke Body: 30-Day Slimdown*, and in 2017 launched the Brooke Burke Body app; her signature Booty Burn class is taught in Malibu. She has had a swimwear line, *Barely Brooke*, and swimsuit calendars.
She has written two books: *The Naked Mom* in 2011, on motherhood and the difficulties of building a blended family, and *Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Joy of Less*, co-authored with Amy Newmark in 2016. Since January 2020 she has co-hosted the iHeartRadio podcast *Intimate Knowledge* with Meghan King Edmonds and Lila Darville.
Her personal life has been public throughout. She married the plastic surgeon Garth Fisher in 2001 and divorced in 2005, with two daughters, Neriah and Sierra. She married the actor and singer David Charvet in August 2011; they have a daughter, Heaven Rain, born in 2007, and a son, Shaya Braven, born in 2008. They announced their separation in April 2018 and finalised the divorce in March 2020. She has been with the real estate entrepreneur Scott Rigsby since August 2019. Her brother Tommy died in July 2021. After her own cancer treatment she became the face of the American Cancer Society's Bucket List campaign in 2014.
Why Brooke Is Called a Genius
The word does not fit in its ordinary sense, and inflating it would be a disservice. No critic has called Burke a genius, she has not claimed it, and there is no body of original creative work to point to: her hosting is competent and warm rather than distinctive, and her *Dancing with the Stars* victory was a competition won with a professional partner who choreographs for a living.
What she does have is a specific and genuinely uncommon commercial intelligence, and it deserves naming precisely. Burke recognised, well before the term "influencer" existed as a job description, that an audience's attachment to a television personality could be converted directly into products — and, crucially, that the products should come out of her own circumstances rather than a licensing deal. Post-pregnancy belly wraps in 2007, a mothers' community in 2011, fitness programmes and then an app: each was built at the moment her own life was passing through that market, and each was aimed at exactly the audience her magazine covers had already assembled. That is a coherent, repeated strategy, not luck. So is the pivot from contestant to host on the same show, and the pivot from television to podcasting to *Fool Us*.
The honest counter-case is that longevity is not the same as brilliance, that the businesses are lifestyle brands rather than inventions, and that a great deal of her visibility over three decades has rested on being photogenic in an industry that rewards it. If there is genius here it is entrepreneurial and self-directional — the ability to read a career as a portfolio and rebalance it before the market turns. That is a real skill. It is not the same as making something new.
Legacy
Burke's more durable mark may be structural rather than performative. She helped demonstrate that a television personality could own the businesses built on her own name rather than rent it out, and ModernMom, launched in 2011, anticipated the creator-led media economy by several years. On screen she has now been a fixture of American television for a quarter of a century across travel, competition, pageant and magic-show formats — a run few of her contemporaries have matched — and she is still working, currently in front of Penn and Teller.
Achievements
- Educated at University of California, Los Angeles, Sahuaro High School and Palo Verde High Magnet School
- Worked as actor, television presenter and model
