Joseph Stanek

Joseph “Seph” Stanek is an arts-led principal investigator whose research emerges from internationally scaled professional performance, production, and institutional leadership. He is the founder of Tour de Fierce and Tour de Fierce Research, an artist-driven platform investigating voice, embodiment, emotional regulation, and meaning-making as they occur in real-world performance contexts rather than laboratory proxies.

Stanek is the creator and director of Places! The Kristin Chenoweth Tour Experience, a global music education initiative that was recognized onstage during the Recording Academy’s GRAMMY® on the Hill Philanthropist Award presentation (2019) when the award was presented to Kristin Chenoweth. The project’s Hollywood Bowl premiere served as a qualifying criterion for the honor and positioned arts education as a measurable public good within national cultural policy conversations.

Stanek has served as co-producer and vocal coach for The Andrea Bocelli Show at the Roman Colosseum, a historic televised benefit concert featuring Andrea Bocelli, Elton John, Steven Tyler, Reba McEntire, and the Orchestra dell'Accademia Musicale di Santa Cecilia, among others. His performance career includes international engagements with Opera Lyrique-en-Mer in France, appearances at the International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival in England, and a United Nations gala performance of Akhenaten: The Musical at the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur—situating artistic practice within cultural diplomacy, ritual, and public meaning-making. He has also performed for two sitting U.S. Presidents, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, in official and ceremonial contexts.

On Broadway, Stanek appeared as a featured performer and backup singer for Kristin Chenoweth in My Love Letter to Broadway, and collaborated with Dolly Parton, Ariana Grande, Jennifer Hudson, and Reba McEntire as creative director for Chenoweth’s For the Girls studio album, which charted across multiple Billboard categories. Additional screen work includes the PBS documentary Carol Channing: Larger Than Life.

Beyond performance, Stanek has operated in high-accountability institutional environments, including lobbying for The Recording Academy in Washington, D.C., contributing to advocacy efforts that culminated in the Music Modernization Act. He is a former Board Member of the Kristin Chenoweth Arts & Education Fund, long-standing faculty member of Broadway Bootcamp, a member of Adobe’s Customer Advisory Board, advisor to the Miss America Organization, and has engaged in sustained philanthropic work with ASTEP, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, and the Historic House Trust of New York City.

Across these contexts, Stanek brings practice-originating expertise in embodied cognition, emotional regulation under social evaluation, and ecologically valid participant experience design—providing research infrastructure that cannot be generated without lived, large-scale artistic practice.