Valerie Work is a long-time downtown playwright who has been primarily writing musical books and lyrics since 2019. Her musical theater projects include full-lengths Tapestries and The Scars of Your Body with composer Evan Johnson, one-act “Is This Who We Are, as Beavers?” with composer John Coyne and bookwriter Holly Hepp-Galvan, twenty-minute “ABCD” with composer Micah Dombrower, and in-development project The Tiniest Head Horn. She also has an interest in opera and has written the text for two arias that were showcased by Really Spicy Opera and a song cycle “Plays” premiered at Georgetown University.
Valerie’s darkly comic writing combines genre elements, especially drawn from science and dystopian fiction, with language that alternates fluidly between poetry and hyperrealism. She loves to create distinctive, offbeat, richly detailed fictional worlds, to exploit the rhythmic properties of language, and to spotlight dorky, quirky, unconventional characters from varied backgrounds. Common themes in her work include gender politics, urban anxieties, education, nerd culture, environmental concerns, parent-child relationships, and coming of age in a complex modern world.
Valerie’s musicals, plays and short film have been developed/produced at/by The New Ohio, The Brick, The Tank, The Bushwick Starr, The West End Theatre, Dixon Place, and more. She is a veteran of several project and professional development programs, most recently Fresh Ground Pepper’s PlayGround PlayGroup (2023) and NYPL’s Across a Crowded Room (2022 and 2023.) She has been a finalist for the Jerome Fellowship and the Leah Ryan Award, won a production grant from the Berks County Community Foundation, and is a New Georges Affiliated Artist.
In addition to her theatrical activities, Valerie teaches freshman composition at CUNY City Tech and Fordham, and she also has an independent private tutoring practice, GlassWork Education. She holds a B.A. from Yale and an MFA from Brooklyn College.
View her full artist resume here.