
Brenda has taught throughout her active performing career, having found a great love of student actors continuing their life-long journeys into the art of theatrical creation.
Her 30 year teaching career has taken her into the world of the Blind with INSIGHT PLAYERS, Asian Canadian performers at CANASIAN ARTISTS GROUP and Aboriginal performers at the NATIONAL NATIVE SUMMER THEATRE SCHOOL. As instructor for Theatre Ontario’s Summer Program she has taught the “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Acting” course and “Hot Scenes: Scene Study”. She also has been the full-time acting instructor at the CENTRE FOR INDIGENOUS THEATRE, run an intensive theatre training program at YOUNG PEOPLES THEATRE, led the young company at TARRAGON’S SPRING ARTS FAIR and helped a multitude of actors with her private coaching. She has been a guest artist, teacher, panellist and speaker at many institutions and schools across the country and is currently on the Theatre Advisory at Humber College in Toronto. Most recently, she has applied her teaching skills to the adjudication of community theatre productions in festivals.
For the Dora Mavor Moore Awards she has served on the TYA and Independent Theatre categories and most recently in 2011- 12, the General Theatre category. She has been a member of arts council juries at every level, allocating funds to fellow theatre artists.
Currently, her private coaching sessions are very popular with both professional and community actors. From time to time, her teaching takes her into community theatres in Ontario, instilling life-long learning in community actors with her successful methods of instruction.
Her private students have included an international opera singer, a fledgling TV Chef/Host, theatre school hopefuls, established actors, retirees and youth. Acting training is a personal endeavour; no two actors learn in exactly the same way.
This past summer her popular “Hot Scenes: Scene Study for the Evolving Actor” was reprised at Theatre Ontario’s Summer Intensive 2012 held at Wilfred Laurier University.