Sometimes, a teacher taking a moment to reach out to a student can end up changing that child’s entire life.

That’s how it happened for Alexander R. Diaz, who today joins NJPAC as our new Vice President of Arts Education.

Alex, who grew up in Union City, relocated with his family to New Milford when he was 13. At that point, he says, “I didn’t know what a musical was.”

But Jane Swarctz, then the New Milford High School Vocal Director, took a moment to mention to the new kid in the eighth grade that “we always need boys, especially, for the spring musical.”

“I thought: Well, okay, I’ll try it,” Alex remembers.

“We always laugh and debate about whose choice it was really that he auditioned,” Jane, now retired, says today.

Whoever gets credit for Alex making it to that audition, the results were astonishing: Alex turned out to have “a beautiful, lyrical tenor. I would call him my ‘velvet voice,’” Jane says. At New Milford High, he immediately joined the chorus (his first solo, that very spring, was “Where Is Love” from Oliver!) and had a lead role in the high school musical every year he attended.

“He practically lived in the music department, and his second home was that stage,” Jane says. “No matter why he stepped onto the stage, that day became the beginning of a love of the arts he couldn’t quench.”

In addition to multiple musicals and concerts at New Milford High, Alex would also join the Bergen County Chorus, North Jersey Chorus and New Jersey All State Chorus, and spent his summers performing lead roles in the musicals that the New Jersey Youth Theater (NJYT) would stage right here at NJPAC.

He played Father here in the same NJYT production of Ragtime that also starred Okieriete Onaodowan, Hamilton’s original Hercules Mulligan, as Coalhouse; the two are still friends. Alex also starred as Billy Bigelow in Carousel and Nicely-Nicely Johnson in Guys and Dolls.

“So to join the team at NJPAC — this is really a homecoming,” he says.

The arts gave him a voice, Alex says today, both literally and metaphorically.

“That voice was given to me early on, in only the eighth grade,” he says. “And I don’t know that I would have found that voice if a teacher hadn’t reached out. And knowing that really shapes my mindset.” Which is why a big part of Alex’s career has been making sure that other kids find their voices through the arts.

From New Milford High, Alex went on to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, where he began a career that would encompass working as a performer, director, producer and finally, an arts administrator. Among other projects, he served as Executive Director and Producer of American History Unbound, a series of events that combine performances by live orchestras and Broadway singers with photographs and film to explore watershed moments in American history, from D-Day to the moon race, at venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to the White House.

But Alex’s longest-running role has been in arts education. In 2010, he joined our sister performing arts nonprofit, the Bergen Performing Arts Center (bergenPAC) as Director of Education and Outreach. He was hired for that role by our own David Rodriguez, just a few years before David would become NJPAC’s Executive Producer.

“When David hired me, he said: ‘What I have for you here is a small budget and a blank canvas. Please be creative; please have fun with it,’” Alex remembers.

So he did: Alex spent a dozen years developing and leading music and theater education programs and early childhood arts education programs at bergenPAC, including a summer musical program, an arts program for students with special needs, and an awards program for local high school musicals. One of his initiatives, called beyondbergenPAC, brought arts education programs into 150 schools across Northern New Jersey.

And in 2022, he was named bergenPAC’s Executive Director, charged with renewing the organization after the COVID pause; he oversaw everything from fundraising to infrastructure improvements, including at one point “taking the lobby from being demolished in August to welcoming a sold-out crowd in October,” he recalls. (As we hustle here to reopen our renovated theaters in time for the Spotlight Gala on October 3, I can sympathize!)

Now, at NJPAC, Alex will lead our Arts Education team as we move our Arts Training programs into the Cooperman Family Arts Education and Community Center and develop programs that help Greater Newark’s young people find an on-ramp into television and film production at Lionsgate Newark.

And from there, I’m sure he’ll develop new projects I can’t even imagine yet.

“The next generation of artists coming up, they’re going to need to know not just the history of music, of theater, but they’re going to need to know how technology ties into that. And NJPAC has the resources, the will and the mission to give them that complete understanding,” Alex says.

I can’t wait to see what happens as Alex brings his life-long love of the performing arts — and his knowledge of how profoundly a teacher can impact a child’s life — to the Arts Center.