Valerie Clayman-Pye
Chair of Theatre, Dance and Arts Management Assistant Professor of TheatreAssistant Professor of Theatre
M.F.A. in Acting, Brooklyn CollegeM.F.A. in Staging Shakespeare, Ph.D. in Performance Practice, University of Exeter
valerie.pye@liu.edu
Description
Valerie Clayman Pye is Chair of the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Arts Management and an Assistant Professor of Theatre who teaches acting, voice and speech, and Shakespeare in Performance. She holds a PhD in Performance Practice, Drama and an MFA in Staging Shakespeare from the University of Exeter, where she worked with Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She also holds an MFA in Acting from Brooklyn College. Valerie’s research focuses on actor training pedagogy, Shakespeare’s Globe, Shakespeare tourism, and on practice-as-research (PaR). Her article, “Shakespeare’s Globe: theatre architecture and the performance of authenticity” is among the most-read articles in the journal Shakespeare (https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showMostReadArticles?journalCode=rshk20). Valerie is a professional actor and director whose work has reached audiences in over twenty countries. As a voice and speech coach, Valerie has worked in theatre, film, and television coaching Academy, BAFTA, Emmy, and Golden Globe Award nominees. Her book, Unearthing Shakespeare: Embodied Performance and the Globe (released by Routledge in January 2017) is the first book to consider what the unique properties of the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s theatre can contribute to both the training of actors as well as to the performances of Shakespeare’s plays. She is the co-editor of Objectives, Obstacles, and Tactics in Practice: Perspectives on Activating the Actor (with Hillary Haft Bucs), which was released by Routledge in December 2019, and the forthcoming volume, Shakespeare and Tourism (with Robert Ormsby; Routledge 2021). Valerie was named a 2018-19 LabWorks Artist at the New Victory Theatre in NYC, where she has been developing "Shakespeare’s Stars", an immersive, multi-media, multi-sensory performance for babies and their caregivers, along with Spellbound Theatre. She continued to develop “Shakespeare’s Stars” as a returning LabWorks artist in 2019-2020, and the most recent workshop production of the piece was featured in The Wall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-baby-or-not-to-baby-shakespeare-show-for-theatergoers-who-are-barely-walking-11578523380). Like so many other projects, the full production of “Shakespeare’s Stars” has been postponed due to COVID-19.
