Lauren Acton is faculty and founding program coordinator for the Performing Arts Fundamentals program at Centennial College in Toronto, Canada. She has additionally taught in Centennial’s Music Industry Arts and Performance program since its inception in 2013.
She is a musicologist, cultural theorist, and performer who received her Ph.D. in musicology at York University, Toronto, her Masters in music from Newcastle University, UK, and her Bachelor of Music from Western University, London, Canada.
Her research and teaching interests embrace a range of topics: musicology, popular music studies, theatre studies, acting, performance studies, cultural theory, and aesthetic philosophy.
A classically trained mezzo-soprano, Lauren has worked with indie rock bands such as Toronto’s Bruce Peninsula and choral groups such as Penthelia Singers. Her first love, however, was musical theatre, and favourite roles include Annabel Glick in Ahrens & Flaherty’s Lucky Stiff, Bricktop in Red Hot and Cole, the Duchess of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers, and Constance Ledbelly in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet).
She is a member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), and the Society for American Music (SAM). Additionally, she serves on the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) advisory group at Centennial College.
Her research has been published on subjects as diverse as the exploration of violence in Canadian musicals, the intersection between tourism and musicals at the Stratford Festival, and how children’s and community musicals relate to curricular and pedagogical trends in North America. She is currently co-writing a novel.