James Martinez Salem
James Martinez Salem (he/him) is an award-winning queer composer, lyricist, bookwriter, and screenwriter of Puerto Rican/Syrian Jewish descent based in NYC. James is particularly interested in telling nuanced stories about characters that are not often given the spotlight (especially stories centering queer joy) and in creating art that is both inclusive and broadly accessible. James and collaborator Jessie Field are the creators of Charlotte Lucas is 27 and Not Dead, a queer adaptation of Pride & Prejudice centering Charlotte Lucas in a joyful gay period romance! Charlotte is a two-time NAMT Finalist (2023 and 2024), a finalist for the Kleban Prize for Libretto (2024), an O'Neill NMTC Semi-Finalist (2022), and the winner of the 2022 Musicals Now Competition by Piper Theatre Co. Charlotte had a sold-out staged reading at the Dixon Place Theatre hosted by the Fresh Fruit Festival in 2021, and a sold-out workshop production by Piper Theatre Co. in Summer 2022. James is also currently working on Fat Girl Starving (book & lyrics by Jessie Field, book & music by James Martinez Salem), a darkly humorous pop-punk musical challenging anti-fat bias, which features five young people overcoming atypical anorexia at a recovery facility. [Note: We use fat as a non-judgmental descriptor of body size!]. Fat Girl Starving was featured in the 2024 New Musicals Mixtape hosted by Prospect Musicals and the Latiné Musical Theatre Lab at the Chelsea Factory, and at Actor Therapy's Writers' Room Concert at 54 Below. Fat Girl Starving will have a reading with TheatreNow NY in February 2024. James and collaborator Jessie field were commissioned in 2022 to create Ziggy, Stardust & Me, a musical adaptation of James Brandon's novel of the same name. Ziggy is a love story between a queer Native teen who lost his father to police violence and a closeted teen undergoing conversion therapy in 1973 Missouri. In 2024, a workshop staged reading was held at Diversionary Theatre in San Diego. Ziggy had a reading with TheatreNow NY in November 2024, and is expected to have a staged reading in October 2025. In 2021, James was a finalist for the Marvin Hamlisch International Music Award for emerging musical theatre artists (with Josh Ben-Ami). James also wrote book and lyrics for Bending All the Rules, which played at the June Havoc Theatre in 2013 as part of the Midtown International Theatre Festival. James is currently a proud member of TheatreNowNY’s Writers’ Lab.