Professor Jeremy Harrison, Professor of Actor-Musicianship
Professor Harrison has spent more than two decades building the field of actor-musicianship into a recognised, world-leading discipline. He joined Rose Bruford College in 2000 and has since served as Programme Director of the BA Actor Musicianship, BA Acting, the MA Actor Musicianship, and the MA Theatre for Children and Young Audiences (TCYA), as well as founding and leading the College’s Theatre for Young Audiences Centre. Rose Bruford College was the first institution anywhere in the world to establish a dedicated actor-musicianship training programme, and Harrison has been central to building the field’s international standing ever since.
His book Actor-Musicianship, published by Bloomsbury Methuen Drama in 2016, is the foundational text in the field and remains, a decade on, the only publication that comprehensively covers actor-musicianship as a discipline. The Bloomsbury commissioning editor wrote that no other book rivals it in covering the area, and that it was with Jeremy Harrison, and at Rose Bruford College, that the field began. The book carries a foreword by Tony Award-winning director John Doyle, a leading figure in actor-musician theatre in the UK and America, and has been adopted as a core teaching text at conservatoires and universities across the UK, the United States, Australia, and Europe.
His work has directly influenced over 900 artists from countries including Norway, Finland, Italy, Brazil, Canada, the United States, Japan, South Korea, Poland, and Cyprus. Specialist actor-musicianship provision has emerged across multiple countries in direct response to his methodology, and that influence continues to grow. His work has also reached the level of industry recognition: actor-musician is now formally acknowledged by Equity as a distinct category of performer, with specific contractual rights and protections, a development that traces directly to the field-building work Harrison has led.
Before entering academia, Harrison had a substantial career as a performer. He was a core member of John Doyle’s award-winning company of actor-musicians from 1995 to 2001, appearing in productions including Moll Flanders at York Theatre Royal, winner of the TMA Award for Best Musical 1995, and Cabaret at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, TMA nominated for Best Musical 1998. He appeared in the original London cast of Crazy for You at the Prince Edward’s Theatre, winner of the 1993 Olivier Award for Best Musical, in Threepenny Opera at the Donmar Warehouse directed by Phyllida Lloyd, in Pirates of Penzance at West Yorkshire Playhouse, and in television productions for the BBC and in the Warner Bros feature film De-Lovely. He did not come to this work as a theorist writing about a form from the outside. He came as someone who had performed it on professional stages for fifteen years, and the practitioners who engage with his research know the difference.
Harrison introduced Theatre for Children and Young Audiences as a core module within the BA Acting and BA Actor Musicianship programmes at Rose Bruford College, embedding TCYA within conservatoire actor training in a way that remains distinctive nationally. In 2011, he established the Theatre for Young Audiences Centre as a dedicated hub for research and professional practice in the field. Through the Centre, he has led the action-research project Dream: the Joy of Creating and collaborated with world-leading companies, including Punchdrunk Enrichment, Oily Cart, and Catherine Wheels. The Centre’s outputs have influenced practitioners and companies in countries including Puerto Rico, Portugal, the United States, Canada, South Africa, Europe, and Japan.
As a Lead Artist for Kent County Council’s Playground, an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, Harrison has pioneered interdisciplinary practice at the intersection of the arts, early years development, and inclusive provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Working with a team of 22 sessional artists, he designs and co-leads provision reaching thousands of families annually across Kent. His work with Playground artists has attracted NHS referrals and has been observed by senior figures at Arts Council England. Playground’s SEND provision has been independently evaluated by an academic in social and developmental psychology at the University of Kent, with a major AHRC research bid in development that Harrison will lead, addressing outcomes for children with SEND at a national scale.
His work as Musical Director and Composer on Oily Cart’s sensory show Space to Be, which toured to the homes of families with disabled young people aged 0 to 18, won the 2021 Fantastic for Families Impact and Innovation Award. His work with the Primary Shakespeare Company at Riverside School in Orpington and Wyvern School contributed to both schools’ achievement of Platinum Artsmark status and was featured as an Artsmark Case Study by Arts Council England.
Harrison is currently working on a Playground commission, collaborating with Makers of Imaginary Worlds and the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Laboratory and the Turing AI Fellowship project Somabotics: Creatively Embodying AI, exploring how soft robotics and arts-led approaches can support relationships between babies and adult carers. It is a collaboration that says something about where practice-based conservatoire research can go when it is given the space and seriousness it deserves, and about Rose Bruford College’s place at the frontier of that work.
The professorship recognises Harrison’s world-leading contribution to actor-musicianship as both an art form and a methodology, and his sustained work building practice and provision that continues to transform training, performance, and community engagement nationally and internationally.
Professor Mary Irwin Furey, Professor of Voice
Professor Mary Irwin Furey is the Co-Programme Director (with Gemma Maddock) of the MFA in Linklater Teaching Practice (Voice and Theatre Arts) at Rose Bruford College. It is the only postgraduate programme in the world to confer Designated Linklater Teacher status on qualifying candidates. She developed it in close collaboration with the late Kristin Linklater, the Scottish voice teacher whose method has shaped actor training across the English-speaking world for more than five decades. The programme has been based at Rose Bruford College since 2022, and there is nothing else like it.
A Designated Linklater Voice Teacher since 2003 and a Senior Linklater Voice Teacher Trainer, Irwin Furey has been very active for some years in training the next generation of Linklater teachers. She holds an MA in Voice Studies from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, and a BA summa cum laude from New York University. Her MA thesis, Alchemical Reactions: The Fusion of Shakespeare’s Text with Voice and Acting Practices in Contemporary Actor Training, gives a clear sense of the questions that have driven her practice throughout her career.
Before joining Rose Bruford College, Irwin Furey spent 23 years on the faculty of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA), one of the most competitive conservatoire actor training programmes in the United States, consistently ranked among the top programmes in the country. She was promoted to Full Professor in 2015, served as Head of Voice from 2001 to 2016 and as Assistant Dean from 2013 to 2016, and on her departure was named Professor Emerita. During those years, she taught and coached on close to 100 productions, and her students have gone on to careers of significant distinction. They include Lucas Hedges, whose performance in Manchester by the Sea earned an Academy Award nomination and who worked with Irwin Furey again on Brokeback Mountain at sohoplace Theatre in London; Jake Lacy, Jonathan Majors, Dane DeHaan, Anna Camp, and Billy Magnussen, Tony-nominated for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.
Her professional coaching credits (as Mary Irwin) span both sides of the Atlantic and include Brokeback Mountain at sohoplace, London; King Lear at Northern Stage, Vermont; The White Devil and Mac Beth for Red Bull Theater in New York, both New York Times Critics’ Picks; and Cost of Living at Manhattan Theatre Club, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and two Lucille Lortel Awards in 2018. Since returning to the UK, she has also taught at RADA, LAMDA, and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
The professorship recognises Irwin Furey’s exceptional and sustained contribution to voice training and performance practice, and her role in leading a postgraduate programme that stands alone in its field internationally.
Both professorships are richly deserved. We look forward to celebrating with the whole Rose Bruford College community in due course.
photo credit, top to bottom: Professor Mary Irwin Furry by Jason Derevitsky, Professor Jeremy Harrison