Peter Dizozza

Peter William Dizozza (born 1958, Forest Hills, New York) is a music composer who also produces supplemental material as a writer, pianist, performer, photographer, and filmmaker. Since 2000 he has been the director of the WAH Theater at the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center.

Peter William Dizozza was born on September 5, 1958 in Forest Hills (Queens), New York. He and his sister, Monica, are the two children of an attorney, Nicholas Frederick Dizozza, who came from a large family in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and a teacher, Madeleine, the only child of Margaret and Anthony Carillo who settled in Forest Hills. Although a fourth-generation New Yorker through both his grandmothers' lineages, Dizozza's ancestry is Italian. His paternal grandfather, Peter Dizozza, was born in Ginosa (Bari), and his maternal grandfather was born in San Giuseppe (Naples). Dizozza had a conservative and strongly Catholic upbringing. He attended Our Lady Queen of Martyrs grammar school and Archbishop Malloy High School in Queens, New York, and then went to Queens College, graduating with a Humanities Degree in Music, English, and Philosophy. After a series of summer jobs with the City of New York obtained through his maternal grandmother's friendship with a Brooklyn political leader, Meade Esposito, in 1981, at the age of 23, Dizozza joined the City Comptroller's Office and worked as an assistant, financial analyst, and court representative under Harrison J. Goldin and Elizabeth Holtzman until 1991. It was while working at the Comptroller's Office by day and attending St. John's Law School at night that Dizozza began directing music at the Bronx community theatre and became enamored with it. He graduated from Law School in 1986 and in 1988, moved to the East Village, Manhattan, and began performing his own material. In 1991 he was admitted into the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop as a composer and began legal employment as an associate with The Law Office of Jerald D. Werlin, a firm specializing in personal injury in Long Island City. His monthly piano/singer/songwriter shows began in November 1995 at—and because of—an open-stage anti-hoot organized and hosted by Lach at SideWalk Bar-Restaurant.

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