Dedicated to instilling valuable life lessons in South Jersey youth through positive experiences with the Arts, Mainstage Center for the Arts began in 1989 when President, Edward P. Fiscella, Jr., a teacher at the Glen Landing Middle School in Gloucester Township, answered the plea of his students to create a theater program that would encompass their long summer vacation. With the help of Vice President, Joseph Bretschneider, also an educator, the Gloucester Township Board of Education, and the Department of Recreation, Summer Stage was born!

Summer Stage became so successful that it spawned demands for year-round arts programming for youth and families. Mainstage was incorporated in 1994 as the Gloucester Township Center for the Arts, a 501 (c) (3) private non-profit.  By 1997, the organization’s regional impact was so significant -- audiences and participants were coming to us from all over the South Jersey area, not just Gloucester Township -- that they decided to rename themselves “Mainstage Center for the Arts.”

Today, Mainstage’s programs reach an annual audience of over 50,000 and serve over 1,000 children directly through classes and workshops. An ever larger base of young people is reached through in-school assemblies and educational outreach, sometimes averaging 2,000 children a program. And for the past five years, Mainstage has been recognized by the Courier Post Newspaper as “one of the best performing arts centers in South Jersey.”