Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are active materials that exhibit reversible actuation when subjected to external stimuli such as heat or light. This unique property has led to their wide application in soft robotics, wearable devices, artificial muscles, and optical machines. The complexity and advanced functionality of LCEs are heavily influenced by the alignment of liquid crystals (LCs). Surface alignment is an ideal approach for creating thin LCE sheets with well-defined mesogen orientations, though the effectiveness diminishes with increasing thickness due to the depletion of anchoring effects. Alternatively, magnetic fields can be used to manipulate LC alignment. While spatially uniform magnetic fields can easily produce simple LC distortions, generating more complex distortions poses significant challenges.In this thesis, I introduce a novel LC patterning strategy for the spatially resolved control of the LC director by leveraging field patterns induced by ferromagnetic materials. High permeability ferromagnetic objects embedded in nematic liquid crystals (NLCs) generate patterned magnetic fields that manipulate the LC director's orientation. Each ferromagnetic microstructure produces unique magnetic field distortions, allowing for the creation of a range of spatially complex director configurations by adjusting the magnetic field strength in competition with NLC elasticity. Furthermore, we explore the use of LCE actuation to establish limit cycle temperature responses and thereby realize a heat switch. The thermomechanical response of an LCE generates temperature-dependent force on a small magnetic widget, which is coupled with the distance-dependent magnetic attraction of the widget to a fixed warm surface. Under appropriate conditions, this results in time-dependent motion exhibiting limit cycle behavior, with heat periodically transferred to a nearby cold surface. We anticipate that this self-sustained cyclical thermal transport will have significant applications in waste heat harvesting. In particular, the thermal oscillator realized here shows promise for waste heat recovery using pyroelectric devices.