Shannon Holmes

Contact Info

Dr. Shannon Holmes is an actor, singer, theatre-maker, director, intimacy director, educator and scholar. She has trained in a wide range of dance, theatre and vocal methods, including bel canto, Contact Improvisation, Roy Hart, and extended vocal techniques. She is a Certified Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework®. Her Practice as Research centres on the development of cross-disciplinary methods that disrupt the dividing line between the disciplines of speech and singing to mobilize new tools for performers. Central in her explorations is using autoethnographic performance practices to examine the connections between the lived body and voice to centralize the self in devising theatre.

She frequently presents at conferences, leads workshops, and performs across Canada, the US and Europe. Her self-devised, autobiographical solo music-theatre piece The Crook of Your Arm was produced at L'Espace POP, Montréal, The Frigid Festival, NYC and The Royal Shakespeare Company's studio stage, TOP in Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK. A new iteration of the show is forthcoming as part of a double bill (Re)Member with singer and sound artist Dr. Helen Pridmore as part of Riser Regina/On Cue's 2024 season. Recently, her interdisciplinary collaboration with Dr. Misha Penton (Research Fellow, Bath Spa UK)—a hybrid live-mediated installation titled Temporal Duets, was featured at the SpokenWeb Research Symposium at the University of Alberta.

Dr. Holmes is Co-Lead Researcher in the Voice Mapping Lab at the University of Regina where, along with Dr. Melissa Morgan (Music), they are writing an Open Educational Resource pressbook which will offer interdisciplinary approaches to voice training for acting and singing students with a particular focus on providing access to training for all regardless of geographical, financial or other barriers. Her article Autoethnography and Voicework, published in the Voice and Speech Review (Routledge), won the 2016 Forum Article of the Year (2016). She is co-editing (with Professor Danielle Wilson, Brock University) an upcoming special issue of the Canadian Theatre Review Issue 196, "Voicework in Canada."

Dr. Holmes holds a BFA in Theatre, with a Minor in Music from Concordia University (Canada), an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College (US) and a PhD in Drama and Theatre Studies from the University of Birmingham (UK). She teaches voice, movement, devised theatre creation, acting, and scene study classes.

Website: https://shannonholmes.ca