ABOUT CASEEN
Caseen Gaines is an author, director, educator, and popular culture historian.
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His work has received praise from media outlets around the world including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and The Hollywood Reporter.
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His latest book, When Broadway Was Black: The Triumphant Story of the All-Black Musical That Changed The World, was published in February 2023. It is the expanded and revised edition of Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way, which was released in May 2021 for the centennial of the groundbreaking Broadway musical, Shuffle Along.
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He is the author of We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy, which led to his television appearances on Entertainment Tonight and Netflix's "The Movies That Made Us." He is also the writer of the officially-licensed E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial: The Ultimate Visual History and The Dark Crystal: The Ultimate Visual History.
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His other work includes A Christmas Story: Behind the Scenes of a Holiday Classic and Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse, which earned Caseen a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award.
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Caseen has been published at Vanity Fair, io9, and New York Magazine — and has written original features for Rolling Stone, The A.V. Club, Fathery, and Decider. He is also a consultant and ghostwriter on several narrative nonfiction projects.
He holds a Master’s Degree from Rutgers University in American Studies, where he focused on racial representations in popular culture, and, in addition to writing, is co-Artistic Director of a nonprofit theater company he cofounded in 2005 and a high school English teacher in New Jersey, where he has taught for seventeen years.