EJ Stapleton, the second of five children, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. There is a story of a babysitter walking in to find him, at two years old, standing in his crib, drawing all over his bedroom wall. Not much has changed since then. He still writes or draws on anything that doesn’t move.

EJ was educated through the Boston Public School system and spent most of his time there searching for whatever information he could gather about Art and the artists who generate it. In 1971, he left for a two-week trip to Italy. He returned in 1973. This began what continues today to be a lifetime of searching. A lifetime of learning, handshake by handshake, the true heart of the human tribe.

In the mid-1970’s EJ was lucky enough to find himself in the company of Joseph Solman, one of the founders of the American Expressionist movement, in New York City. Until his death in 2008 at age ninety-nine, Mr. Solman was one of the most active and powerful influences in the New York art scene.

For the bulk of the 1980s, EJ’s work was primarily under the umbrella of Kiro Kopulos and Ariel Weymouth Payne’s “Intersect Dance Theatre”, a performance company, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with deep roots in the traditions of Noh and Butoh. EJ still considers his time with Intersect to be the period in which his tastes were honed, the benchmark development period by which he measures every subsequent arts experience.

In 2012, EJ, along with Grammy-award winning composer, Peter Stopschinski and NY director, Craig J. George, began work on an adaptation of The Calico Buffalo for musical theater. The Calico Buffalo Musical was first presented in New York at the 2015 New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) where the show enjoyed full houses, an extended run and took home the coveted Audience Award, ‘BEST of FEST’. Their work on the musical continues.

In both 2017 & 2018, EJ Stapleton was named a finalist by The American Theatre Wing for the Jonathan Larson Grant.