{"id":4,"date":"2011-07-14T01:16:14","date_gmt":"2011-07-14T01:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valeriework.com\/?page_id=4"},"modified":"2025-06-16T16:58:22","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T20:58:22","slug":"bio","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/valeriework.com\/?page_id=4","title":{"rendered":"Bio"},"content":{"rendered":"

Valerie Work is a long-time downtown playwright who has been primarily writing musical theater books and lyrics since 2019. Her recent works include Tapestries<\/em> and The Scars of Your Body<\/em> with composer Evan Johnson, \u201cCheck Out\u201d with composer Eric Grunin and bookwriter David Quang Pham, \u201cIs This Who We Are, as Beavers?\u201d with composer John Coyne and bookwriter Holly Hepp-Galvan, “ABCD” with composer Micah Dombrower, and in-progress works The Tiniest Head Horn<\/em> and The Olympics of Beer<\/em>. She also writes opera libretti and has written text for two arias that were showcased by Really Spicy Opera and a song cycle \u201cPlays\u201d that premiered at Georgetown University.<\/p>\n

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, toxic masculinity, the expression of power, urban anxieties, education, nerd culture, environmental concerns, socioeconomic inequality, and coming of age in a complex modern world.<\/p>\n

Valerie’s musicals, plays and short film have been developed\/produced at\/by The New Ohio, The Brick, The Tank, The Bushwick Starr, NYPL for the Performing Arts, Dixon Place, ART\/New York, 14th Street Y, and more. She is a veteran of numerous project development programs, most recently NYPL\u2019s Across a Crowded Room (2022\/2023\/2024-5), Sandbox Musicals\u2019 Playspace III (2025), and Fresh Ground Pepper\u2019s PlayGround PlayGroup (2023). She is also a New Georges Affiliated Artist and a former participant in additional collaborative labs, selective writers\u2019 groups, professional development programs and writers\u2019 colonies. She has been a finalist for the Jerome Fellowship and the Leah Ryan Award, and she was awarded a $10K grant from the Berks County Community Foundation to support the production of her play The Collected Rules of Gifted Camp<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Her library of plays continues to receive productions across the US. Most recently, \u201cHellbender: Live\u201d was presented by Broom Street Theater in Madison, WI and featured in SUNY Brockport\u2019s Festival of Ten. \u201cCrossing the Cow Field, or an Ode to Inertia\u201d was professionally recorded as an audiodrama by On and Off Theatre in 2024 as part of their Soundbytes podcast series.<\/p>\n

Valerie currently teaches first-year writing at CUNY City Tech and Fordham, and she also has a \u00a0private academic and test prep tutoring practice. She holds a B.A. from Yale and an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College.<\/p>\n\n\n

View her full artist resume here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Valerie Work is a long-time downtown playwright who has been primarily writing musical theater books and lyrics since 2019. Her recent works include Tapestries and The Scars of Your Body with composer Evan Johnson, \u201cCheck Out\u201d with composer Eric Grunin and bookwriter David Quang Pham, \u201cIs This Who We Are, as Beavers?\u201d with composer John […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valeriework.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valeriework.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valeriework.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valeriework.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valeriework.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":55,"href":"https:\/\/valeriework.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":426,"href":"https:\/\/valeriework.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4\/revisions\/426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valeriework.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}