Geraldine Connor, PhD, MMus, LRSM, DipEd (22 March 1952 – 21 October 2011), was a British ethnomusicologist, theatre director, composer and performer, who spent significant periods of her life in Trinidad and Tobago, from where her parents had migrated to Britain in the 1940s.

Geraldine Connor is best known for having written, composed and directed Carnival Messiah, a spectacular work that "married the European classical tradition of oratorio with masquerade and musical inspiration from the African diaspora".

[4] Spending her early childhood with her grandparents, who were both teachers in Trinidad,[5] Geraldine was schooled at Tranquillity Primary (1960–63) and Diego Martin Government Secondary (1963–68).

[4] She worked with choirs, vocal soloists, and instrumental and folk ensembles both as an educator and as a performer, in which capacity she toured with productions of Porgy and Bess, Showboat and Carmen Jones.

[1] As a theatre practitioner, Connor was active composing, performing and directing in a wide variety of projects, among which feature writing the music for Jean "Binta" Breeze's Spirit of the Carnival (Birmingham Rep, 1994), appearing in The Man Who Lit Up the World at the Hackney Empire (1991), and co-directing Chesa Chesa for the Adzido Pan African Dance Ensemble at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (2001).

Her most ambitious creation was Carnival Messiah, which reimagined of Handel's masterpiece with a cast of more than a 100, being first staged in 1999 by the West Yorkshire Playhouse – where in September 2003 Connor was seconded for two years as associate director – and subsequently being performed internationally, drawing record audiences of up to 27,000.

[11][12] Her other successes as a director include Margaret Busby's historical drama Yaa Asantewaa—Warrior Queen, a co-production between the West Yorkshire Playhouse and Adzido Pan-African Dance, which toured the UK and Ghana in 2001–02,[13] Vodou Nation (2004), a multi-media reflection of Haiti, Blues in the Night (2005), and a production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse of the reggae-based musical derived from the iconic 1972 film The Harder They Come.