John L. Stepanian II

John L. Stepanian II is the founder and Executive Director of The New York Performing Arts Academy and The Conservatory at NYPAA, and the founder and Chief Executive Officer of The MusicSquared Group. He is also the founder of The MusicSquared Foundation, Inc., the 501(c)(3) public charity that houses the Academy’s charitable programs. Across those roles he has built a training organization whose central premise is that serious performing arts instruction should not be reserved for students who can afford it.

He started with a company rather than an institution. In 2011 he founded FutureStar Studios as a for-profit venture built around developing young performers, and its programs began training students the following year. After FutureStar produced its first major success story, it became clear the model would reach further without a commercial structure around it, so on June 15, 2015 he incorporated The New York Performing Arts Academy, Inc. as a New York not-for-profit corporation and brought FutureStar in as one of its programs. That decision set the pattern for everything since, which is that the work determines the structure rather than the reverse.

The organization he built now spans several divisions, including The NYPAA Experience, The Academy of Music Production, and, in 2025, The Conservatory at NYPAA, and it serves students from across the United States and abroad. He established The MusicSquared Foundation, Inc. in 2023 to carry the charitable side of that work, and under his direction the Academy has awarded hundreds of scholarships and has extended emergency assistance and housing support to students whose training would otherwise have stopped. He is deliberate about what the Academy is and is not. It is a conservatory-style, non-degree training program built around working professionals teaching in a studio, and its value is measured in what a student can do at the end of it rather than in what is printed on a certificate.

Stepanian is a composer, arranger, and lyricist as well as an executive, and a member of ASCAP. He is credited as arranger and composer across the catalog of Latin artists, on releases including Solo Un Segundo, Calles de Nueva York (TA-KI-TA), Supersonico, Dembow, and Vacilón, issued through MusicSquared, and as a lyricist on La Pared by Las 2AM, released through El Diablito Records. In 2027 he releases ‘Vissuto d’amore’, a full length indie opera album under the name J.Stepanian & Co. that sets the great arias against contemporary production, drawing on Puccini, Verdi, Bellini, and Donizetti, including Nessun dorma, Casta Diva, O mio babbino caro, Un bel dì vedremo, Che gelida manina, Va pensiero, Una furtiva lagrima, Eri tu che macchiavi, and Di Provenza il mar. Each track is staged in a present day world, with the same longing and grief the librettists wrote now playing out in a glass tower at night, a crowded apartment, a city street. The argument behind the record is the one that drives the Academy, which is that the repertoire does not need to be kept under glass to be respected, and that the way to keep it alive is to put it in front of an audience in a language that audience already speaks.

He works as an arts advocate at the policy level as well. He was invited to speak at the United Nations Global Festival of Creative Economy in 2020, where he addressed the economic weight of the performing arts and how creative industries can be used to grow national economies and support sustainable development, during the period surrounding the UN resolution proclaiming 2021 the International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development. The Foundation aligns its programming with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly quality education, reduced inequalities, and decent work for artists.

What he does day to day is less visible than any of that. He recruits the faculty, sets the curriculum, sits with families working out how to pay for training, and reads the room when a student is talented and out of options. The scholarships, the payment plans, the emergency funds, and the training studios all exist because he decided that the barrier to a performing arts education in New York should be talent and work rather than money, and he has spent fifteen years building the machinery to make that true.