Brian D. Valencia is a dramaturg, composer, lyricist, musical director, staging director, and performer, whose scholarly research focuses on musical theater, especially musical theater in early America. He holds MFAs from NYU/Tisch and the Yale School of Drama, and has taught at Yale, New World School of the Arts, the University of Miami, and Florida International University. In summer 2019, he will earn his doctor of fine arts degree from Yale in the field of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism. Brian currently serves as Conference Planner for the Music Theatre/Dance focus group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and is a past visiting research fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and Harvard’s Houghton Library. Additionally, Brian is an alum of Harvard University’s Mellon School for Theater and Performance. He has presented papers extensively at conferences in the United States and Europe, and his scholarly writing has appeared in The Palgrave Companion to Musical Theatre Producers, The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, Studies in Musical Theatre (lead article), Contemporary Theatre Review, Common-place, Theater magazine, and the New York Public Library’s Musical of the Month project. As a practitioner, Brian was a research consultant on the Broadway revival of Shuffle Along and has collaborated on numerous theatrical works seen and heard in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Miami; New Haven, Connecticut; and Seoul, South Korea.