Brendan Bailey is a multidisciplinary artist with a diversified management background. An accomplished actor, singer, playwright, poet, theatrical director, and educator, Brendan has also proven his mettle as a restaurant general manager and business operator for Noodlebox, an industrial production supervisor for Barkerville Gold Mines (Osisko-Development), a fire warden for BC Wildfire, and as a former municipal fire chief for the District of Wells.
Brendan is currently a FireSmart Coordinator and Bylaw Officer for the District of Wells, and holds an MBA in Executive Management and a Graduate Certificate in Management Consulting. He also has his own consulting business: Bailey Consulting Services (BSC). He is the President of the Friends of Barkerville – Cariboo Goldfields Historical Society, and, previously, he served as Chair of the Sunset Theatre Society for several years.
Alongside his wife, Emily, he is an artistic director and production manager of Noble Players Theatrics, an independent theatre company they created to bring stories connected to BC’s various gold rushes to the stage. Their first offering has been Brendan’s one-actor biography play: Sawney’s Legacy.
Over the past decade, Brendan has perhaps become best-known for a performance-art act called Goldpan Poetry. The act sees him recite his own intimate, vulnerable, and sometimes erotic poetry while wearing only —you guessed it— a gold pan. It’s an act he originated fifteen years ago during the Sunset Theatre’s popular seasonal fundraiser, the Sunset Cabaret, and continues through Sunset Cabaret’s to this day.
He is also known professionally on screen for his work as a C-list television actor struggling with alcoholism in Barkerville: The Series, and as a prospector turned bounty hunter in the 2019 VIFF Official Selection and Bell Media-produced Shadow Trap (which was available to stream on Crave for 18 months 2020-2021). Brendan has also appeared in a number of independent short films. He is featured in the holiday romantic comedy A Great North Christmas (2021) and the beautifully gritty and desolate GOLD (2013), an Official Selection at the 63rd Berlinale Film Festival.
He has accrued 12 formal seasons as an actor in Barkerville Historic Town and Park. This has included leading tours and performing on stage, in the street, in the courthouse, and on the waterwheel. He also works in historic trades such as blacksmithing, typesetting, and printing while educating and hosting visitors in an immersive open-air theatrical experience as a daily-life historical interpreter.
Brendan is also a published poet, historian, and author. He is presently researching and writing a book on the museum-history of Barkerville Historic Town & Park called Where the Past is Present: Loving Living History in Barkerville, BC.
The Baileys live in a small mountain community in the interior of BC where they are focused on raising their family and producing compelling theatre while preserving historical assets in the midst of a modern gold rush. They are active volunteers and community members in historical, theatrical, and emergency services, are restoring an historic 1930s mining company home, and spend their little free time exploring the beautiful backcountry just outside their backdoor.
