Valerie Clayman pye (SHE/HER)

Classical and heightened texts, emergent actor training

NYC/Long Island
www.valerieclaymanpye.com

Valerie Clayman Pye (she/her)
Guiding Faculty

Classical and heightened texts, emergent actor training

New York City
www.valerieclaymanpye.com

Valerie Clayman Pye, Ph.D. is an actor, director, author, and academic who specializes in making Shakespeare accessible and training other artists to do the same. She is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Arts Management at LIU Post, where she teaches acting, voice and speech, and Shakespeare in Performance. She is a 2026 recipient of the David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching at Long Island University. As a theatrical intimacy choreographer and educator, Valerie is especially interested in the intersection of intimacy and actor training, boundary systems for facilitators and artistic leaders, and structures to help academics thrive in today’s academy.

Valerie’s research focuses on actor training pedagogy, Shakespeare’s Globe, Shakespeare tourism, and on practice-as-research (PaR). A professional actor and director, Valerie’s work has reached audiences in over twenty countries, and as a voice and speech coach she has worked in theatre, film, and television with Academy, BAFTA, Emmy and Golden Globe Award nominees.

She is the author of Unearthing Shakespeare: Embodied Performance and the Globe, the first book to consider how the performance properties of Shakespeare’s Globe can help actors to perform Shakespeare, and Innovation & Digital Theatremaking: Rethinking Theatre with ‘The Show Must Go Online’ (with Robert Myles). She is also the co-editor of Revenge is Mad Hard: Fat Ham and the Question of Cultural Reclamation (with Danielle Rosvally), Objectives, Obstacles, and Tactics in Practice: Perspectives on Activating the Actor (with Hillary Haft Bucs) and Shakespeare and Tourism (with Robert Ormsby). Her essays have appeared in Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin, Teaching Shakespeare, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, New England Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and several essay collections. When she isn’t focusing on Shakespeare and devising new work of her own, Valerie has worked extensively on new play development, alongside writers such as Reginald Rose (Twelve Angry Men). A 2018-20 LabWorks Artist at the New Victory Theatre in NYC, Valerie was the lead creative artist on "Shakespeare’s Stars", an immersive, multi-media, multi-sensory performance for babies and their caregivers (Spellbound Theatre), which was featured in The Wall Street Journal and had its Off-Broadway debut at the New Victory Theatre in May 2023. Her recent research, Storyboarding Shakespeare involves the use of AR technologies to help actors visualize the replica of Shakespeare’s theatre through virtual rehearsal and perform Shakespeare with confidence.