New Haven Remembers Aleta Staton, Arts Titan & Community Connector

Semi Semi-Dikoko, David Sepulveda, and Aleta Staton at the Arts Awards. Judy Sirota Rosenthal File Photo with permission from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. The second photo in this story is from the photographer Leigh Busby, used with permission.

The curtain opens. On stage, Aleta Staton is a little girl again, her nose buried in a book. The sound of children playing outside wafts through the open window. The scene shifts. She is 21 and a radiant Olive Hamilton in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, standing in the spotlight. A beat, and she and her daughter Jade are waiting in the wings, ready to take on the world. 

When she steps out of the shadows, she is radiating light. She is forever radiating light.    

That is how dozens of New Haveners are remembering Staton, a fierce and vibrant champion of the arts who died at Hartford Hospital last Thursday. A lifelong New Havener, cultural trailblazer and steadfast advocate for artists and their work, she left an indelible mark on the city’s stages, choirs, churches, and schools, lifting up generations of creatives in the process. 

She did that through many roles over the years: as chair of the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission and an arts facilitator in its public schools, as vice president of the New Haven Heritage Chorale, as director of learning and community organizing at Long Wharf Theatre and community engagement at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, as a professor at Quinnipiac and Yale Universities and and nationally touring actor and theater producer. 

She had just turned 66, and was beloved by a community that stretched from West Hills to Pittsburgh to North Carolina to Montana and back. She had been quietly, gracefully battling congestive heart and kidney failure for years. 

A GoFundMe to help cover her funeral expenses is available here.  

"She was my one and only and I was hers," said her daughter, Jade Staton, in a phone call on Thursday. “When people asked why she didn’t have more kids, she’d say it was because she got it right the first time. She was kind and loving and supportive and warm. I also knew her to be so, so, so encouraging. Of me, and of everyone around her. I’ve never felt so empty without her.”

"One of the reasons that this hits so hard is because of the great contribution that she made not to just life, but to the artistic soul," said Dr. Jonathan Quinn Berryman, who met her when he founded the Heritage Chorale of New Haven in 1998. "It hits deeply. Her life was meaningful in ways that I’m not even sure yet I can describe. Aleta was a phenomenal thought partner.  She just had such an insight into what could be."

Staton's life, which touched hundreds if not thousands of artists, started in the city's West Hills neighborhood in June 1958, when she entered the world with a quiet, pensive curiosity that would define her for the next six and a half decades. In those early years, she was best known among her siblings as a tiny intellectual, more likely to curl up with a book than to play outside with her siblings. Only a good game of badminton, remembered her older sister Laura McClam, could reliably get her out of the house. 

“It was amazing” to grow up with her, McClam said in a phone call Thursday. At home, Staton and her four siblings were a mellifluous bunch, and the house was often filled with their joyful music-making. When Staton wasn’t reading—and sometimes even if she was—she was singing with her sister and brothers, songs that ranged from jazz and blues to the latest hits by Earth, Wind and Fire.   

It launched a lifelong love affair with the written word, and with the fine and performing arts. In middle and high school, Staton joined the hundreds of young New Haveners who passed through the Bowen-Peters School of Dance, forging some of the friendships that would stay with her for the rest of her life. It was there that she became close with New Haven arts legends Chuckey Brown and the late Paul Hall, whose contemporary dance company she later managed in the 1990s (when Hall passed away, it was also Staton who arranged a fundraiser for his funeral at the Shubert Theatre). 

Even then, fellow New Havener IfeMichelle Gardin could see the cultural spark that lived in Staton, who was both a friend and a cousin. The two, who knew each other from childhood and danced together as teens, would both go on to work at nearly every arts organization in the city, the only Black women to do so in 1990s and early 2000s New Haven. 

“Aleta was the most supportive person for so many people,” Gardin said. “She never got angry. She got disappointed, but she didn’t get angry. She knew how to meet people where they were.”

Leigh Busby Photo.

By the time Staton was a student at James Hillhouse High School, she was working at Bowen-Peters as an office assistant, building some of the administrative tools that would later serve her at countless arts organizations in the city. For at least two years of high school, McClam remembered, she also worked on the school newspaper, honing her writing skills as she learned to cover the city around her. 

But when she headed to Wesleyan University in the 1970s, Staton didn’t initially plan to pursue the performing arts. McClam can’t remember what she intended to study, she said—but it wasn’t acting. Not at first.Then a friend—the late Paul Hammer, who was then one year ahead of her in school—began talking about Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths, in which he was performing. She saw how a play could become a person’s entire world.  By her second semester, she had switched to a theater major.

“She was always so warm and so kind,” recalled Paméla Delerme, who was a year behind Staton at Wesleyan, and roomed with her for a summer during college. Even though the two were in different majors—Delerme is now a certified nurse midwife—they were both lifelong New Haveners, and managed to find each other on campus. “Every day, she saw the good around her. She always tried to leave you on an up note, as opposed to a down note.” 

The Ebony Singers in Action. Contributed Photo.

From the theater, Staton immersed herself in the arts across campus, making her mark in Wesleyan’s still-nascent Ebony Singers and the school’s West African drum and dance group, then helmed by Abraham Adzenyah. At the time, both groups were still relatively new, and Staton led the way, bringing a gospel sensibility to the Ebony Singers. Classmate Allison Brown, who later decorated her hospital room with photographs, remembered performing alongside her as she grew her cultural footprint.

Offstage, she also did what cultural workers do best, and often out of necessity—she mastered the art of the side hustle. Over multiple conversations, former classmates remembered her as a gifted barber and hairdresser, whose coiffures became recognized for their style and precision. Dr. Lisa Nelson-Robinson, who lived with Staton her junior year, credits her marriage and three children to those haircuts, she said in a phone call Wednesday. 

As she tells it, Staton was in a staging of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, playing Olive Hamilton opposite the man who would become Nelson-Robinson’s husband. But at the time, “he had this big bushy beard,” and Nelson-Robinson wasn’t interested, she remembered with a laugh. That was, until Staton worked her magic with a pair of shears and clippers. 

“I was sitting at my desk studying for organic chemistry, and I hear her say, ‘Lisa, look what I found,’” Nelson-Robinson recalled. “And she had shaved this man and given him a fade. That was Aleta. She was looking out for me, and she just … she intuitively knew what to do to get the ball rolling.”

After graduating with high honors, Staton balanced her own passion for theater with a deep belief in empowering those around her. In the 1980s, she went on tour with Ntozake Shange’s 1976 for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, a choreopoem that dovetailed with her own love for dance and theater. It was a love that she later brought to theater festivals across the country, bringing fellow New Haveners with her when she could.  

When Staton returned to New Haven, she made its artists her official business. In the 1980s and 90s, she became a cultural force in the city, mounting theater productions and arts festivals as she took on writing, teaching and facilitation work with Area Cooperative Educational Services (ACES) and the New Haven Board of Education. In 1995, she, Gardin, and Bea Dozier-Taylor launched the first IFETAYO African American Family Day Festival, which took place at Bowen Field. 

It was also during those years that her daughter Jade, who was without question the center of her universe, amade her debut. As a kid, “I was always backstage,” Jade remembered, watching as her mother brought dozens of stages to life as an actor and a director. From the time she was in diapers, “I grew up around a lot of adults and artists,” and she knew she had a home among them if she wanted it. 

Offstage, her mom was as much an intellectual as she was an artist, and pushed her daughter to do well in school as she figured out her own interests. For Jade, she defied gravity, finding the resources to expose her daughter to the arts several times over. In a phone call Thursday, she remembered learning that her mom had cobbled together the funds for a piano in their home, because a teacher had said that Jade needed it to progress in her studies.  

“She lived her life with a lot of freedom and creativity, she was never judgmental and she was always very open,” Jade said. At the same time, “she gave me structure and education. At one point, when I was taking art more seriously than my studies, she made sure I became a lot more balanced. But she also let me make my own way.”  

That guidance—gentle but firm, and always centered on love—set Jade up to soar, she said. After studying the liberal arts at Johnson C. Smith University, Jade asked her mom how she would feel about her going on to cosmetology school. 

Her answer—“do it seriously and be really good at it”—became a mantra. She credits her work as a sought-after hair and makeup artist, for which she has traveled around the country, to that upbringing. “It’s all because I grew up on her hip, holding her hand, right by her side,” she said.

Educator Sharon Esdaile, who became a founding member of Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School (BRAMS), remembered meeting Staton during that time, first through the Dixwell Children’s Creative Arts Center and then through BRAMS, where Jade was a student. As educators, the two bonded right away, and remained close for the decades that followed. 

When Esdaile left BRAMS for Wintergreen Interdistrict Magnet School, Staton worked with her to dream up a collaboration based on the Harlem Renaissance, in which she played the blues singer Alberta Hunter. It became the basis of a one-woman show on the same subject. 

“Aleta truly believed in the sense of our being together—in the gathering of people for concerts, gathering to see a show, sharing a piece of writing, the idea of making sure that the stories get told and they get shared,” Esdaile said. “And that youth are participating in these kinds of events and settings.”  

Staton during an elder honoring ceremony from the Official Juneteenth Coalition of Greater New Haven.

And indeed in her work, Staton remained a dedicated arts advocate, taking on positions that centered youth engagement, cultural bridge-building, and citywide outreach. As program director at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, she launched the organization’s first resource center, a hub for working artists that helped nurture groups like City Spirit Arts and the first delicate seeds of Artspace New Haven. As an arts facilitator in the public schools, she connected students with dozens of teaching artists, jumpstarting careers in the process. 

Her resume never stopped growing: she became an instrumental teacher, arts leader, and connector at the University of Connecticut, Long Wharf Theatre, International Festival of Arts & Ideas, and in recent years Quinnipiac University and the David Geffen School of Drama. At Quinnipiac, where she taught several classes in acting and directing, she pushed students and fellow staff members alike, in productions that ranged from Sean O'Casey’s Shadow of A Gunman to Kristen Greenidge’s Baltimore.    

“There are certain people who, when they speak to you, you hear them with your ears but they have the ability to like, speak to your soul,” said Dr. Don Sawyer, who was in that production of Baltimore and is now the Vice President of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Fairfield University. “She could lift you up.” 

“If you mention her name, you know that she knew everyone and everyone knew her,” he added. “I think part of that is her spirit. You always felt warm around her. You always felt seen.” 

But it was her work off the clock for which she was even more well known across the city. In 1998, she became an early member of the Heritage Chorale of New Haven, where she served for years as vice president with a rich, joyous alto that could (and did) travel right to the rafters. During her time with the group, she helped welcome new members while growing the repertoire, breathing new life into so many of the pieces she had come to love.

Berryman, who founded the chorale in his former Fair Haven apartment, said he is mourning not just the loss of a friend and great artist, but a brilliant mind. In almost three decades of singing together, they talked about everything from the chorale’s wardrobe choices to repertoire to public education. When he’s not conducting, Berryman is the assistant principal at James Hillhouse High School. 

Staton and members of Crowns, which ran at Long Wharf Theatre in in 2018. Elizabeth Nearing Photo.

“Everybody’s had an experience with her, where she just, in her quiet way, showed that creativity and that compassion,” he said. “She’s been a thought partner for so long. One of the things that makes New Haven livable is who you are able to sit down and think with. She’s one of the people that made New Haven livable.” 

“She was just able to convince you that things would be alright,” added Dr. Charles Warner, Sr., who knew Staton through both education and the Heritage Chorale. “She put her all into making sure that the arts reached everybody, that the arts are a part of everyone’s life, no matter what.”

Part of that livability, many friends added, was her deep belief in civic engagement—that the arts were vital to a functioning democracy, and could catalyze change within it. As a longtime member and chair of the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission, Staton championed everything from New Haven’s annual jazz festival to Black Wall Street, often tapped as the liaison between the city and its arts organizations.

“She always had this sense of arts knowledge and a very calming presence,” remembered Kim Futrell, community outreach coordinator for the Department of Arts, Culture & Tourism. When Staton became a panelist for the city’s Cultural Vitality Grant Program in 2005, she was endlessly patient, with a capacity for deep thought and reflection that stayed with the other panelists. 

“[It was] her willingness to just be there and help out wherever it is needed, her love for the arts,” Futrell said. “She was just a beautiful person.”

Even in her last decades of life, Staton showed few signs of slowing down—so much so that people often did not know she was sick, Jade said. In the early 2000s up through 2016, she was instrumental in the much-loved performances (and later, the revival) of Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity, which over the years traveled from Long Wharf Theatre to Varick Memorial AME Zion Church to Dixwell UCC to the Church of Saint Paul and Saint James. 

As she made the show her own, she also made time to empower the artists with whom she was working. Musician Dana Elizabeth Fripp, who described her as a friend and collaborator for over two decades, remembered her as a staunch supporter and quiet cheerleader, who never stopped finding opportunities for fellow artists to excel. 

In 2007, the two went from a performance of Black Nativity to a workshop for Olympia Dukakis’ Another Side of the Island, ultimately performing the show at theater festivals in Whitefish, Montana and Orlando in 2008 and 2009. It was during an exhausting two-week run, Fripp said, that she started to realize what a fighter Staton was, and how often she put on a brave face despite her health. 

“She was a warrior and a lover of creating art with other people,” Fripp said. Several years later, it was Staton who advocated for her to perform with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, in an 11-school tour that ultimately reached 10,000 students. “That tenacity and that passion sustained her.” 

That sense of passion echoed for playwright Terrence Riggins, whose work Unbecoming Tragedy is coming to Long Wharf Theatre next year. Shortly after moving to New Haven in 2014, Riggins met Staton through a mutual friend who knew that both loved theater. From that first moment, “she just lent an ear as I struggled and strived,” he remembered. She knew he was working on a play and read early drafts, there to talk when a scene left him flummoxed. 

The two became close, theater buddies that traveled as far as Pittsburgh for the annual meetings of the August Wilson Society, and might be spotted at Bregamos, Long Wharf, or the Shubert for any given performance. When he saw her at a birthday party for the drummer Brian Jawara Gray last year, he was excited to sit with her and catch up. 

“Michael [Mills] said, ‘Terrence, Aleta said come over here and sit down with us!’” he remembered with a warmth in his voice. “She really was about accommodating folks and bringing people together.”  

She also continued to teach, picking up new classes in anti-racist theater practice at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale as she recovered from Covid and a long-undiagnosed stroke. In her classes, which were well-loved and run more like workshops, she worked to be a bridge between town and gown, bringing in theatermakers and arts practitioners of color like Dexter Singleton, Adriane Jefferson, Rafael Ramos and Hope Chávez. 

If her commitment to artists never faltered—even as her health did—neither did her faith. At Dixwell UCC, which she joined roughly 10 years ago, she was a vibrant member of the church choir and the board of deacons. Anntonie Thorpe, who served alongside her on the deacon board, remembered how the two would often enter the church arm-in-arm, supporting each other in body and in spirit. 

She was “a quiet storm” who walked the walk in everything she did, Thorpe said. From Staton, she gained new insight into what it meant to endure and to advocate for oneself, which her friend so bravely did in everything from her classroom to her own healthcare and treatment plan. “She was like a superhero.”    

She was a gift to the church and its congregants, added fellow Deacon Cheryl Riley Ray, current chair of the church’s deacon board. Several years ago, Riley Ray brought a Gullah Bible back from one of her trips down South. After seeing how her friend struggled “to get through just a couple of lines,” Staton took over. It remained a treat, Riley Ray said, whenever she read from it. 

“She lived a life of integrity, a life of faith, and a life of appreciating beauty in all of its ways of being expressed,” said Rev. Frederick “Jerry” Streets, who served as the church’s pastor until last year.  

In her absence, which is an ache, friends and family have already begun thinking about how to carry on her legacy. In every interview for this article, people suggested music and art, like the gospel that filled her hospital room when she entered Hartford Hospital, and stayed there for  over a month. Several suggested a scholarship in her name, to support young artists of color who are just starting their careers. 

Jade, meanwhile, suggested that it’s even more simple—to do for others the kindnesses, large and small alike, that her mom did for New Haven every day. She recalled a healing drum ceremony that took place two years ago, when Staton knew that she was moving up on a transplant list. Several of her longtime friends, including drummers Michael Mills and Brian Jawara Gray, gathered at Bregamos Community Theater in her honor. 

“She wanted to get together with friends because she didn’t know when she would see them next,” Jade said. “She didn’t know what was gonna happen.”

What happened, in that moment, was that dozens of friends, artists from across Staton’s life, showed up to celebrate and root for her. At one point, Mills began to drum while walking, stopping only when he had reached Staton. As he drummed in the rhythm of a heartbeat, he extended one hand to her chest, and rested it there, willing her health to return with no words at all. 

Jade can still remember the rush of emotion that came over her: everyone in that room knew that her mom needed a new heart to survive. Few had any idea how hard she’d been fighting while waiting for it.

“It was moving, and really special and scary, but it was a moment that I will never forget,” she said. “It highlighted the fact that people were there, and they were supporting her, and they cared about her wellbeing, and they loved her.”

“My mom wanted us to pay that forward,” she continued. Instead of a health journey, “she called it a healing journey. Even though it didn’t end the way we had hoped, she tried and she fought really hard.”