Josh Grisetti spent nearly two decades building a career on stages from off-Broadway houses to the Kennedy Center, then devoted his final chapter to a classroom, leading the Musical Theatre BFA program at California State University, Fullerton. Grisetti died on July 10, 2026. He was 44.

Grisetti was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Franklin County, Virginia, attending Franklin County High School before finishing his secondary education at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where he earned a diploma in drama in 2000, according to UNCSA. He then studied in Boston, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Musical Theatre from the Boston Conservatory in 2004.

His first major New York role came in the York Theatre Company's 2008-2009 production of Enter Laughing, playing David Kolowitz. The performance won him a Theatre World Award for outstanding debut and brought nominations from the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Drama League and Lucille Lortel committees. In the years around it he worked steadily off-Broadway, in Rent, Peter and the Starcatcher, Red Eye of Love, Candida and After the Ball, and regionally at the Kennedy Center and Signature Theatre, picking up a Los Angeles Ovation Award along the way for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

A Broadway debut nearly came a year later. Grisetti was cast as the adult Eugene Jerome in a revival of Neil Simon's Broadway Bound, set to run in repertory with Brighton Beach Memoirs at the Nederlander Theatre alongside Laurie Metcalf, Dennis Boutsikaris and Santino Fontana. The plan collapsed when Brighton Beach Memoirs closed early on weak ticket sales, and Broadway Bound never opened, producers Emanuel Azenberg and Ira Pittelman confirmed at the time to Broadway.com. Grisetti's actual Broadway debut arrived six years later, in the original musical It Shoulda Been You, where he played Marty Kaufman. The role won him the 2015 Clarence Derwent Award for most promising performer on the New York stage, an honor he shared that year with Hamilton's Phillipa Soo.

The stage work took him internationally as well. In an all-star Japanese production of Prince of Broadway, co-directed by Harold Prince and Susan Stroman, Grisetti played George in She Loves Me, the Emcee in Cabaret, Hero in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and Molina in Kiss of the Spider Woman. Prince had scouted him seven years earlier after catching an off-Broadway performance and had told him, "I want to work with you someday," Grisetti recalled in a Boston Conservatory alumni interview.

Back on Broadway in 2016, Grisetti stepped into Something Rotten! as Nigel Bottom, the earnest younger of two playwriting brothers competing with Shakespeare in Elizabethan England, taking over the role from John Cariani. "All the references tickle me," he said of the show's layered jokes, naming the ensemble number "We See the Light" his favorite because it was Nigel's only turn inside the show's fantasy sequence, he told TheaterMania. He went on to originate the role on the show's first national tour, which opened at the Boston Opera House in January 2017 alongside Adam Pascal and his Broadway castmate Rob McClure.

On screen, Grisetti appeared in the ABC sitcom The Knights of Prosperity and the films The Immigrant and Revolutionary Road. In 2023 he took a recurring role as Ralph, a comedy writer inspired by Joe Stein and Carl Reiner, in the final season of Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, opposite Rachel Brosnahan. He also wrote and narrated God in My Head, a 2016 memoir published under his full name, Joshua Steven Grisetti, recounting his path from an evangelical upbringing to a self-described spiritual awakening.

Grisetti joined the Cal State Fullerton faculty in 2021 as an Associate Professor and Head of the Musical Theatre BFA program, where he helped redesign the curriculum. He also taught at Fullerton College and Loyola Marymount University, where he earned an MFA in Performance Pedagogy, and led masterclasses at his own alma mater, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, as well as at the Boston Conservatory, Arizona State University, Emerson College and AMDA Los Angeles. He kept performing and auditioning throughout his professorship. "A lot of schools that offer B.F.A.s have faculty who don't currently work in the industry," he told CSUF News in 2023, the same year he filmed his episodes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. In fall 2022 he secured a $113,000 Hispanic Serving Institution grant from CSU Northridge and Apple, plus a $30,000 technology package, to produce The Boys and the Nuns, a new musical about Latine and LGBTQ+ activists in 1986 Chicago, saying the industry needed "strong new works by diverse creators featuring diverse characters and stories." His students staged the piece at the university's Arena Theatre in November 2023.

What persists is concrete. A musical theatre program at Cal State Fullerton reshaped around his conviction that students deserve teachers still working in the rooms they train for. A group of students who mounted an original musical about activists that history rarely stages, because he found the funding and pushed the project through. A memoir, in his own recorded voice. A season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel that keeps his performance in circulation. Those are the marks of a working actor who spent his last years teaching the craft as deliberately as he had practiced it.