Ursula K. Heise is Distinguished Professor in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, and a co-founder of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). Her research and teaching focus on the environmental humanities; contemporary environmental literature, arts, and cultures in the Americas, Germany, Japan, Spain, and Vietnam; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. 

Her books include, among others, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam (2024), and Unsettling Extinction (2026). She co-edits the series Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave Macmillan. She is also producer and writer of Urban Ark Los Angeles, a documentary about urban parrots created as a collaboration of LENS with the public television station KCET-Link. The first episode of Grand Theft Eco, a series of "machinima" animated videos about the environmental futures of Los Angeles based on the storyworld and game engine of the videogame Grand Theft Auto V, was launched in 2025. 

Heise’s work has consistently investigated how environmental storytelling converges and conflicts across different languages and cultures. She has proposed the concept of “eco-cosmopolitanism” as a way of approaching cross-cultural environmental thought and activism, and has emphasized the importance of environmental justice and multispecies justice as ways of thinking across the boundary between human and nonhuman species. She is currently at work on the second episode of Grand Theft Eco and a book entitled Reclaiming Ecotopia: Speculative Fiction and Environmental Futures. 

In 2024, she was awarded the Biophilia Award for Environmental Humanities by Spain's BBVA Foundation. In 2026, Heise was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.