Valerie Work is a long-time downtown/experimental 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-progress full-length The Tiniest Head Horn. She also has an interest in opera and has written the text of several 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, The Exponential Festival, 14th Street Y, NYPL for the Performing Arts, and more. She is a New Georges Affiliated Artist and a veteran of labs, selective writers’ groups, development programs and writers’ colonies. Currently, she is developing the book and lyrics of new musical The Tiniest Head Horn with Fresh Ground Pepper’s PlayGround PlayGroup.

Valerie currently teaches composition at CUNY City Tech and runs her own private tutoring practice. She holds a B.A. from Yale and an MFA from Brooklyn College.