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-length The Scars of Your Body with composer Evan Johnson, twenty-minute “ABCD” with composer Micah Dombrower, one-act “Is This Who We Are, as Beavers?” with composer John Coyne and bookwriter Holly Hepp-Galvan, and in-development projects Tapestries and The Tiniest Head Horn. She has also written the text of several opera arias and a song cycle that 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, 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, and more. She is a veteran of numerous labs, selective writers’ groups, development programs and writers’ colonies. She recently presented the book and lyrics of Act I of The Tiniest Head Horn with Fresh Ground Pepper’s PlayGround PlayGroup and is currently developing Tapestries with the NYPL Across a Crowded Room program.
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.