Bruce Barton is a playwright, dramaturg, director, and scholar. His stage plays have been produced across Canada on stage and radio, and have been celebrated (National Playwriting Competition finalist, Merritt Award nomination) and published (New Canadian Drama 8: Speculative Drama from Borealis Press). Selected stage works include Still, Life (1993), Roswell (1998, 2001), Taking Art (2004), All Good Things (2013), and YouTopia (2013); nationally broadcast radio dramas include Gros Morne Variations #3 (1998) and Two Strangers (2003). In the past two decades Bruce has worked primarily as a writer, dramaturg, and director with physically-based and devising performance companies, such as Number Eleven, Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland, Zuppa Theatre, Bluemouth, Inc., and Theatre Gargantua.

Bruce has also directed professionally for two decades, most recently with his own company Vertical City (YouTopia, All Good Things, Trace, 2YouTopia), Kaeja d'Dance (The Rogue Show), and Hopscotch Collective (Swimmer (68)).

Bruce also holds a PhD in Theatre and Film, and he was a faculty member at the University of Toronto for the past 15 years (2001 - 2015), where he taught playwriting, dramaturgy, devising, and intermedial performance. In January of 2015 Bruce became the first Director of the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary. He has published in many scholarly and practical periodicals, including TDR, Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review, University of Toronto Quarterly, and Theatre Research in Canada, as well as several national and international essay collections. His book publications include Developing Nation: New Play Creation in English-Speaking Canada (2009), Collective Creation, Collaboration and Devising (2008), Reluctant Texts from Exuberant Performance: Canadian Devised Theatre (2008), Imagination in Transition: Mamet Moves to Film (2005) and Marigraph (2004). He is the co-editor of the theme issues of Canadian Theatre Review on “Theatrical Devising” (2009), “Memory” (2011) and "Dance and Movement Dramaturgy" (2014), as well as the theme issue of Theatre Research in Canada on “Theatre and Intermediality” (2011). Current research includes a three-year study (SSHRC) on dramaturgies of the body in physically-based devised theatre and intermedial performance and a two year study (SSHRC) on intimacy in interdisciplinary performance.