Gene Scheer (born April 28, 1958) is an American songwriter, librettist and lyricist.

Scheer was born in New York City. The son of two teachers, he was raised in Washington Township (Long Valley), New Jersey, and attended West Morris Central High School. He received his Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, followed by a scholarship to the University of Cologne and a Rotary International Fellowship to study at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. While in Europe, he worked as an actor and singer in leading roles at the Theater an der Wien, the Deutsches Theater in Munich and as director George Tabori's assistant at the Schauspiel Köln (Cologne).

Scheer worked as a librettist with Tobias Picker on Thérèse Raquin (based on the 1866 novel by Émile Zola), commissioned by a consortium of companies including the Dallas Opera, San Diego Opera, and the Opéra de Montréal, and premiering in Dallas in November 2001, starring Diana Soviero. A revised version of Thérèse Raquin was performed in March 2006 at the Linbury Studio Theatre of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Scheer collaborated again with Picker on An American Tragedy (based on the novel by Theodore Dreiser, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 2005, starring Nathan Gunn, Patricia Racette, Susan Graham, Dolora Zajick and Jennifer Larmore.

Scheer has collaborated with the composer Jake Heggie on a number of projects, including the critically acclaimed Moby-Dick, which premiered at the Dallas Opera in April 2010, starring Ben Heppner and Stephen Costello. In February 2008, the Heggie-Scheer collaboration Last Acts (based on a play by Terrence McNally), opened at the Houston Grand Opera, starring Frederica von Stade. (Last Acts was subsequently retitled Three Decembers). They also collaborated on lyric dramas To Hell and Back commissioned and debuted by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in November 2006, featuring soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian and Patti LuPone, and For a Look or a Touch, written for a baritone, actor, and chamber ensemble (debuted by the Seattle ensemble Music of Remembrance in 2007). In May 2012, Music of Remembrance premiered a Heggie/Scheer lyric drama based on the life of Krystyna Żywulska, an Auschwitz survivor.

Scheer worked with composer Jennifer Higdon on Cold Mountain, an operatic adaptation of the National Book Award-winning novel of the same name for the co-production by Santa Fe Opera in 2015 and by Opera Philadelphia in 2016.

He's also written the libretto for the opera Intelligence composed by Jake Heggie in 2023.

Scheer collaborated with Mason Bates for the operatic adaptation of Michael Chabon's 2000 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay which premiered in 2024 at the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University Bloomington. A substantially revised version opened the Metropolitan Opera's 2025–2026 season.

Also a composer in his own right, Scheer has written a number of songs for Renée Fleming, Sylvia McNair, Stephanie Blythe, Jennifer Larmore, Denyce Graves, and Nathan Gunn.