Mary Saunders Barton is a Penn State Professor Emeritus, currently residing in NY where she maintains a private voice studio for professional musical theatre performers. She is also an adjunct voice professor in the musical theatre program at Montclair State University. Mary received a master’s degree in French language and literature from Middlebury College and the Sorbonne, Paris. While in Paris, she studied French art song with the great baritone, Pierre Bernac. She is an unapologetic Francophile. Her own performing career spanned twenty years and included Broadway, off Broadway, regional, film, and television credits. Her one-woman show Stop, Time played to sell-out houses in New York City.

While at Penn State, Mary served as head of voice instruction for the BFA in musical theatre. She also created an MFA in musical theatre voice pedagogy with colleague Norman Spivey to meet the growing demand for voice teachers who specialize in vernacular techniques. Graduates of the MFA Program have gone on to teaching positions at universities in New York, Massachusetts, Nevada, Virginia, Amsterdam, and Athens, and are contributing to the profession in performance, writing, and research. In this and recent seasons her students have been seen on Broadway in Wicked, The Music Man, Shucked, The Book of Mormon, Beetlejuice, Beautiful, Bandstand, Moulin Rouge, Funny Girl, Merrily We Roll Along, and Ain’t Too Proud, among others, in addition to many national tours and regional productions.

National, International Presenter

She is frequently invited to present master classes and workshops at universities and voice conferences in the U.S. and abroad. She gave the keynote musical theatre presentation at the 2013 International Congress of Voice Teachers (ICVT) in Brisbane, Australia, and has served twice as a master teacher for the NATS Intern Program.

The book “Cross-Training in the Voice Studio: A Balancing Act,” (2018 Plural Publishing) resulted from her collaboration with Norman Spivey. She contributed chapter 6 to the NATS publication, “So You Want to Sing CCM” and is a contributing author in the second editions of “A Spectrum of Voices” by Elizabeth Blades (2018 Rowman and Littlefield) and “The Vocal Athlete” by Wendy LeBorgne and Marci Rosenberg (2021 Plural Publishing) She is also a contributing author in Elizabeth Benson’s “Training Contemporary Commercial Singers” (2020 Compton) She has published articles in a number of pedagogical journals.

Mary has also produced two video tutorials Bel Canto/Can Belto: Teaching Women to Sing Musical Theatre and What About the Boys?

In 2018, Mary was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Contemporary Commercial Vocal Pedagogy Institute at Shenandoah University.

She is Chair of The American Academy of Teachers of Singing.