Meet Our Students: Juliet Russell

Based in London (UK), Juliet Russell is a creative director, vocal coach, choir director, composer and graduate of our MA Voice Pedagogy programme. Her work spans the music, arts and entertainment industries.

In what she describes as a “career high”, Juliet has recently worked as a Creative Director for the legendary Kool & The Gang’s 2023/24 Las Vegas residency, curating theatrical elements, developing story boards for visuals, styling and screen content, and collaborating with each creative department. At the time of writing, she is in Nice, France with the UK team (represented this year by female vocalist trio Stand Uniqu3) for the annual Junior Eurovision Song Contest, a joyous celebration of young talent across 16 different countries.

During her career to date, Juliet has worked with BRIT, MOBO and Mercury Prize-winning artists and is the vocal performance coach on leading British entertainment shows including The Voice and Michael McIntyre’s Big Show. She has also performed at Glastonbury and the Royal Opera House (no less) and worked with artists and organisations from Gorillaz to the Olympic Torch Project.

She co-founded the Liverpool creative music company Sense of Sound – which champions female musical creativity – and is currently the MD of Assemble (a professional contemporary choir) and Portobello Live! Choir (a free community choir), having led choirs since she was a teenager. During the COVID lockdown, she even started a Tuesday Tutorial Instagram series which offers free vocal exercises for singers (the series is still running at @julietrussell).

Although initially drawn in by the chance to update her voice knowledge, Juliet soon became motivated by research, academic milestones and a sense of community once she began her MA programme. When asked to sum up her whole MA experience in just ten words, Juliet described it as “challenging, rewarding, brain-expanding, fun, stimulating and hard work”. She noted that the balance between feeling connected and part of a community, and being able to follow your own learning path at a distance, was just right, and paid tribute to VSC Director of Studies Debbie Winter for being “very knowledgeable, analytical and supportive”.

Completing her MA degree has given Juliet confidence and the time to develop qualities such as co-creation and reflection. Her final dissertation explored collaboration in a community choir and how to facilitate co-creation, and this in turn informed co-producing and creative directing Assemble’s ‘Blue Monday’ music video (watch here). Thanks to the MA, she also now reflects a lot more and consciously builds deliberate pauses and processes into her approach.

Juliet is ready to press the ‘pause’ button after a very busy year (including completing a sound healing course with Simone Niles) but is currently writing a lot of music and is feeling the call to sing and perform again! She also has coaching/technology and writing projects to work on in 2024. You can find out what she’s up to at www.julietrussell.com.