Dr. Brian D. Valencia is a Latinx historian, dramaturg, composer, lyricist, musical director, staging director, and performer, whose scholarly research operates at intersections of music and theater. Often this entails excavating and contextualizing untold stories of musical theater in early America, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, foregrounding and celebrating the artistry of marginalized figures. He holds a doctor of fine arts degree in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, as well as an MFA in musical theater writing as a composer-lyricist from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Brian has taught at Yale, New World School of the Arts, the University of Miami, Ohio University, Florida International University, and Wright State University. Production highlights include the election-year extravaganza Of Thee I Sing at the University of Miami (co-director), a carefully remixed Hamlet at the Yale School of Drama (dramaturg and co-adapter), and the original musical Three Sisters, or The Dormouse’s Tale at the Yale Cabaret (song- and co-bookwriter). He was a research consultant on the 2016 Broadway revisal of Shuffle Along and has collaborated on numerous other theatrical works seen and heard in New York City; Washington, D.C.; Miami; New Haven, Connecticut; and Seoul, South Korea. 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. A member-at-large on the General Council of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), Brian is also a former Focus Group Representative of ATHE's Music Theatre/Dance Association.