Joey Gillis was born and raised in Nutley, NJ, just a short ride away from New York City.  He became involved with theatre in high school, and soon after became a groupie of several Broadway shows.  After spending a couple of years hanging out at stage doors and finishing high school, he went to live at Hofstra University for a year.  We call this "the year the doesn't count."  After several years of working (retail) he returned to school at Montclair State University, starting out as an English major but eventually finding his way to music.  With fanciful dreams of writing and singing pop songs (and graduating in 3 years) he became a music theory/composition major.  However, he found himself taking to and performing classical repertoire and hanging with the voice majors more than the composition students.  Realizing that life was pushing him back to performing, he decided to further his training and dedicate himself to working as a musical theatre actor.  Therefore, in 2006 he was accepted to the Masters program in Vocal Performance (in Music Theatre) at NYU-Steinhardt, receiving his MM in May, 2008.  His two years there brought him an invaluable amount of knowledge and preparation, and he is now actively auditioning not just for musical theatre, but dramatic, film, and commercial work as well.

While a lover of music of all kinds, his favorite works to perform are contemporary classical and post-modern musical theatre pieces. An avid fan of pushing the envelope, he loves works that cross genre boundaries and develop the displacement of the traditional identity of the American musical. He hopes to work more and more with new composers interested in blurring the lines between genres.