{"id":4,"date":"2011-07-14T01:16:14","date_gmt":"2011-07-14T01:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valeriework.com\/?page_id=4"},"modified":"2026-06-17T14:08:33","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T18:08:33","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 full-length musicals include Tapestries, The Scars of Your Body, <\/em>and in-progress The Tiniest Head Horn <\/em>with composer Evan Johnson. Their songs have been featured at The Green Room 42, Up Next! salon, Colorado New Musical Festival, and Sandbox Musicals PlaySpace. She developed The Tiniest Head Horn<\/em> with Fresh Ground Pepper\u2019s PlayGround PlayGroup (2023.) Her 20-minute musicals \u201cElizabeth & Essex\u201d (book, with composer Julian Rosenblum and lyricist Meira Marom), \u201cCheck Out\u201d (lyrics, with composer Eric Grunin and bookwriter David Quang Pham) and \u201cIs This Who We Are, as Beavers?\u201d (lyrics, with composer John Coyne and bookwriter Holly Hepp-Galvan) have been presented at NYPL for Performing Arts as part of the Across a Crowded Room program.<\/p>\n

Valerie 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. She completed a short opera \u201cABCD\u201d with composer Micah Dombrower.<\/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\u2019s library of plays continues to receive productions across the US. Her plays have been developed\/produced at\/by The Brick, The Tank, The Bushwick Starr, Dixon Place, ART\/New York, 14th Street Y, and more. She is a New Georges Affiliated Artist and a former participant in 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>. She is the author of a short film, \u201cPokemon NO!\u201d that has been screened at The Sheen Center and The New Ohio.<\/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 full-length musicals include Tapestries, The Scars of Your Body, and in-progress The Tiniest Head Horn with composer Evan Johnson. Their songs have been featured at The Green Room 42, Up Next! salon, Colorado New Musical […]<\/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":56,"href":"https:\/\/valeriework.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":455,"href":"https:\/\/valeriework.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4\/revisions\/455"}],"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}]}}