Josh Grisetti

Josh Grisetti is an American actor, director, educator, and author born on December 1, 1981, in Washington, D.C., who works across theatre, television, and film. He grew up in Rocky Mount, Virginia, outside of Roanoke, and completed his secondary education at the North Carolina School of the Arts, earning a Drama diploma in 2000. He went on to study at The Boston Conservatory, graduating in 2004 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Musical Theatre.

Grisetti first drew significant industry attention through the York Theatre's 2008–2009 production of Enter Laughing, a musical adaptation originally titled So Long, 174th Street. His performance earned him a Theatre World Award for Outstanding Debut Performance, along with nominations from the Drama Desk Awards, the Outer Critics Circle, the Lucille Lortel Awards, and the Drama League. A planned Broadway debut in the 2009–2010 season, in which he was set to star as Eugene Morris Jerome in a Neil Simon revival of Broadway Bound directed by David Cromer, was canceled when the production's companion show, Brighton Beach Memoirs, closed shortly after opening at the Nederlander Theatre, prompting Broadway Bound to be called off two weeks before its scheduled premiere.

His Broadway career began in 2011 when he portrayed Mordred in a concert staging of Camelot. His first Broadway book-musical credit came in 2015 with the original production of It Shoulda Been You, in which he played Marty Kaufman. That performance earned him nominations from the Drama Desk Awards and the Outer Critics Circle, as well as a 2015 Clarence Derwent Award for Most Promising Male Actor. In 2016, Grisetti joined the cast of Something Rotten!, replacing John Cariani in the role of Nigel Bottom, and subsequently originated the role on the production's first national tour, which ran from 2017 to 2018.

On television, Grisetti appeared in the short-lived ABC sitcom The Knights of Prosperity in 2007 and had a recurring role in the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime in 2023. He also starred in two NBC pilots that were not ordered to series: The Gates in 2013 and Like Magic in 2019. His film appearances include The Namesake in 2007 and The Immigrant in 2013.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Grisetti became the first graduate of the MFA in Performance Pedagogy program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Beginning in the fall of 2021, he joined the faculty at Cal State Fullerton, where he helped redesign the BFA in Musical Theatre curriculum and achieved tenure two years later. He also developed a presence on TikTok, producing content focused on musical theatre training and offering critiques of higher education, particularly the student loan industry.

In February 2016, writing under his full name Joshua Steven Grisetti, he published a memoir titled God in my Head: the true story of an ex-Christian who accidentally met God, which he described as an account of a near-death experience he underwent after overdosing on pain medications at a dentist's office. The book was originally self-published and later acquired by Tantor Media, which republished it as an audiobook.