Dean Burry

Newfoundland-born and Toronto-based librettist, composer, and educator Dean Burry has written twelve nationally and internationally-performed theatrical works for young people, including The Hobbit, The Secret World of Og, The Scorpions’ Sting, The Bremen Town Musicians, Le nez de la sorcière, The Vinland Traveler, Angela and Her Sisters, Pandora’s Locker and The Sword in the Schoolyard. His opera The Brothers Grimm, commissioned by the Canadian Opera Company in 1999, has been presented over 600 times and is considered “the most performed Canadian opera in history” (Bill Richardson, CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera). From 2015 to 2017, Burry served as Artistic Director for the Canadian Children’s Opera Company. He has been a key player in the Education and Outreach Department of the Canadian Opera Company since designing the celebrated After-School Opera Program in 1997. As Program Leader and Music and Stage Director, he has created over fifty operas with young people in various Toronto communities and/or implemented many highly successful outreach programs for such organizations as the Canadian Children’s Opera Company, Ontario Arts Council, The Royal Conservatory of Music, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the Toronto District School Board. He is also a professor of new and Canadian music at the Glenn Gould Professional School of the Royal Conservatory. Burry was the 2011 recipient of the Ontario Arts Foundation’s Louis Applebaum Composers Award for excellence in the field of music for young people. Recent premieres include Tempest in a Teacup in Guiyang, China and The Bells of Baddeck at the Alexander Graham Bell Museum in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.