RESEARCHER
Dr Caitlin Vincent is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Industries at the University of Melbourne, where she researches the future of work in the arts. Areas of interest include cultural labour, digital performance, and opera. Dr Vincent has an extensive record of publication across traditional and non-traditional research outputs and has gained international recognition and esteem for her expertise in gender inequality and operatic labour markets.
Dr Vincent has a track record of high-impact industry-facing research and has co-authored high-profile commissioned reports for industry bodies including the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Arts Centre Melbourne, the Australia Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council (Canada). In 2018, she was recruited by Arts Centre Melbourne to serve as an impact evaluation consultant for their internal programs, including the Australian Music Vault.
Dr Vincent’s PhD research, completed in 2019, was funded by an ARC Linkage Project (LP140100742) and constitutes the first scholarly examination of the impacts of digital technology on creative collaboration and company management for opera production. Dr Vincent’s resulting monograph, Digital Scenography in Opera in the Twenty-First Century, was published in 2021 by Routledge’s Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera series.
Dr Vincent’s research into gender inequality in opera has positioned her at the top of the field, as one of few scholars to examine opera as a site of employment rather than solely an artform. Her research on this topic was cited at length in an Issues Paper produced by the Australia Council for the Arts (now Creative Australia) as part of their 2019 Gender Equity and Diversity in Opera Summit and has received media coverage by high-profile platforms including SBS World News, ABC Radio National, and The New York Times.
In 2024, Dr Vincent was awarded a prestigious Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council to fund a three-year research project examining career pathways for conductors and directors working in opera.
Dr Vincent is also in high demand as a media expert and a frequent contribution to The Conversation, Limelight Magazine, and ABC Radio platforms. Her 2020 article on arts organisations offering free digital content during the pandemic has been read more than 90,000 times and was selected as one of The Conversation’s 50 best articles of 2020. The piece was subsequently published in 2020: The Year That Changed Us (Thames & Hudson).
Dr Vincent holds degrees from Harvard University (BA), Johns Hopkins University (MM), and Deakin University (PhD). Prior to entering academia, she was a professional opera singer for more than a decade in the United States and served as artistic director of The Figaro Project opera company in Baltimore, Maryland from 2009 to 2014.