ABOUT
Warren Bain is an Actor, Director, Writer, Facilitator, and Arts Educator hailing from Toronto and work has taken him across Canada in roles ranging from sea monsters to 1930’s British aristocrats.He is an Arts Educator and Social Arts Activist with over a decade of experience and has extensive training in the creation, development, and execution of Image Theatre, Forum Theatre, and Theatre of the Oppressed. He uses his knowledge of devised community-based theatre creation with Actors and Non-Actors from ages five to seventy-five. He is well versed in arts management, tour coordination, technical considerations, and through experience with various mentors and organizations, has gained foundational knowledge in all aspects of theatre creation.
“Art teaches us how to be with each other, and how to be with ourselves.”
He is currently Education Coordinator at the Shaw Festival in beautiful Niagara-on-the-Lake, where he facilitates and assists with the daily operations and development of the Shaw Festival’s Beyond the Stage programs. These programs aim to provide accessible information and activities that engage and enlighten participants about The Shaw, our plays, and the world of theatre and the arts. We plan, produce and evaluate all public programming for youth (school groups, college/university courses, and youth camps and workshops), educators (production study guides, workshops and professional development) and adults (everything from free talks and chats to multiple-day lifelong learning courses).
Warren spent eight seasons in Prescott, Ontario with the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival where he spent six seasons as an actor and two seasons as Assistant Director to Rona Waddington (Antony & Cleopatra, The Three Musketeers), Richard Sheridan Willis (As You Like It) and Andrea Donaldson (The Taming of the Shrew); director of a reading of Rose Napoli’s That’s Amore! He was also the Program Director of the Young Artist Training Program for two seasons where he wrote, taught, and directed The Kating Game and What not, that’s sweet and happy.
He is an Artistic Associate with Sheatre, a rural based arts company whose mission it is to use theatre and the arts to empower individuals and contribute to a healthy, compassionate society. He has been involved as actor, co-writer of the film script, Joker, Assistant Director, and Director in their award winning Forum Theatre production about sexual assault, consent, and creating healthy relationships Far From the Heart / Loin du Coeur since 2009. He was Joker of their Forum Theatre production Be Our Ally a play about homophobia and gender based violence, and Joker for Hearts & Minds a show about front-line hospital workers and patients with mental illness.
Warren is Co-Artistic Director and Company Manager of Bain & Bernard, a company known to utilize a vintage aesthetic to reach new audiences. Bain & Bernard are adept at vaudevillian style sketch comedy, street performance, and drastic comedic overhauls of Shakespearean plays. “The funny will be headlined by some truly gifted comedians, Bain & Bernard. The best way to describe them is to picture Abbott & Costello flung from the 1940’s to the present day.”– Lanrick Bennett Jr. TORONTO TOURISM NEWS. (bainandbernard.com)
He was the Administrative Coordinator and an Arts Workshop Facilitator for Sparkin’ Art, Funded with support of Sheatre, the Laidlaw Foundation, Meridian Credit Union, SPARC Network, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Sparkin’ Art was a free digital studio born out of the Covid-19 pandemic which provided accessible workshops, creation/performance spaces, and financial recognition to intergenerational, non-urban artists of rural, isolated and marginalized communities. Sparkin’ Art produced multi-week digital innovation artistic studios for rural youth and intergenerational community artists in Ontario called Release the Fire Within and Solstice, hosted an online Pandemic Open Mic called I Needed That!, and facilitated a Town Hall called Tending the Fire: Creating Sparks and Preventing Burnout which centralized the questions “What does community arts look like for youth in rural Ontario during a pandemic? What did we learn and how can we best support more work like this that helps to support and empower youth in our communities?”
Warren is adept at arts education and has worked with such companies as Kids on Broadway, Performing Arts Collective, Canadian Opera Company, Suitcase Theatre, Sheatre, Mixed Company Theatre, Toronto District School Board, Toronto Catholic District School Board, Toronto Parks & Recreation, Mirvish Productions, St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare in Action, Watermark Theatre, Youth Elevating Youth, Yellow Door Theatre Project, and the Shaw Festival. He has been sought out for speaking engagements, arts consultation, and to facilitate his workshops Theatre for Conversation, mySELF my CONFIDENCE, Shakespeare? Forsooth! and Yes! Improv!
Selected credits include THEATRE: Rocky Horror Picture Show (Capitol Theatre, Moncton NB); Boeing Boeing, Crimes of the Heart (Watermark Theatre, PEI); The Great Kooshog Lake Hollis McCauley Fishing Derby, Miracle on 34th Street, (Upper Canada Playhouse); Weekend Comedy, A Christmas Carol (Orillia Opera House); …And Then The Lights Went Out (StageWest Calgary); Jeeves Intervenes, Jeeves in Bloom (Chemainus Theatre Festival, Vancouver Island, BC); Romeo and Juliet Chainsaw Massacre (Toronto Fringe / Bain & Bernard); The Comedy of Errors (Company of Fools, Ottawa, ON); Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, All’s Well that Ends Well, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Hamlet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Tempest (St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival). WRITING: The Balcony Scene (Shawgrounds, Shaw Festival); Far From the Heart – Joker and Film Adaptation Script (Sheatre co-writer); Foxes and Grapes (Pat the Dog Theatre – 24 Hour); Stephanie Street (Artists for Action); Lawyers at Large (Project Humanity); Andy’s Story: The Aspiring Nova Scotian Tap Dancer (Cod Willing Prod.); Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Hamlet (Advice to the Players, NH, USA; SLSF; B&B), Desdemona’s Dream or A Midsummer’s Night Mare!, A Cratchit Carol (SLSF, B&B), What not, that’s sweet and happy (SLSF). TV & FILM: Fangers, Close Encounters, Less Than Satisfactory, Girls & Bicycles, Road Scholars: BSP, Gray Christmas, The Blue Seal. AUDIO: Narrator for audiobook The Longest Year by Daniel Grenier.
He is a graduate with honour’s of Toronto Metropolitan University’s BFA Theatre Performance program (2009), graduate with excellence and honours of the Arts Administration & Cultural Management program at Humber College (2020/21), recipient of the Dean’s Scholarship for Art Administration through Humber College (2021), completed the Indigenous Canada course through the University of Alberta (2020), participant of the Toronto Fringe Theatre Entrepreneurs’ Network and Training Program (TENT 2020/21), the recipient of the Edna Khubyar Acting Award, former Program Director and the Performance Workshop Coordinator for Suitcase Theatre, Co-Creator of the Canadian Love Stories Project. Warren is a long-standing member of Canadian Actors’ Equity Association and ACTRA. He holds dual citizenship with the United Kingdom. (warrenbain.com)
RESUMES available upon request.