Stanley Marc Fried was born in Los Angeles, California on 13 February 1947. His parents, Abraham Israel Fried and Evelyn Fried (nee Lazarus), moved to California from Providence, Rhode Island after the Second World War and just prior to his birth. Mr. Fried considers himself fortunate for being conceived in Providence and born in the City of the Angels. He has an older brother, Norman Mendel Fried. A few years ago, Stanley was informed by his neice April that his brother legally changed his name to Norman Marc Freed.

Fried's public school years were spent in Long Beach, California where he spent most summer days with his family at the beach until he reached middle-school. Nearly all Sundays were spent pier fishing, a sport his father enjoyed but which the rest of the family suffered.

Stanley Fried studied theatre and dance at Long Beach City College and later joined South Coast Repertory Theatre in Orange County, California. He created the sound scores for a number of productions there including A Moon for the Misbegotten and the West Cost premiere of America Hurrah . He wrote an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz which was staged at SCR as well as an experimental work Emergency Broadcast System: This Is Only A Test.

He left SCR and joined the Open End Theatre in Newport Beach, California where he wrote and directed Peridot: In Passing, an experimental theatre piece. A review of this show in The Los Angeles Times opened with, "Something which claims to be theatre is currently playing at ...". This is Mr. Fried's favorite review. In 1969, he was invited to present Peridot: In Passing at Experiments in Art and Technology at the University of Southern California. As a result of that performance, the Student Body of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, invited him to stage a four-day theatre event on ecological concerns to coincide with the Clean-Air Car Race in the summer of 1970.

In this same period, Stanley Fried worked as a Psychiatric Technician at Fairview State Hospital in Costa Mesa, California. This work was civilian service in lieu of military duty as a conscientious objector. He also provided draft counseling services. He was fired from his work there after filing a report on patient abuse.

Stanley M. Fried is a graduate of the California Institute of the Arts (BFA: 1973). While there, he studied and worked with Allan Kaprow, John Willett, Paul Roche, Deanna Metzger, Jeremy Shapiro, Paul Brach, Miriam Schapiro, Hallock Hoffman, and Marshall Ho'o among others. When he later worked at the University of California, San Diego, he had the opportunity to work with Jerome Rothenberg, David Antin, Eleanor Antin, and Newton and Helen Harrison.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Fried was the Administrative Director of CETA Administration for City Arts (CAFCA) in Los Angeles. Initially operating under the aegis of the California Confederation of the Arts, this program contracted with the City of Los Angeles and the County of Los Angeles to administer federal funds of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) for the employment of artists (visual and performing) through non-profit arts organizations. Mr. Fried kept the entire works of Franz Kafka on his desk as a commentary on the bureaucracy in which the program was entangled but few ever seemed to see the relationship between the books on his desk and the acronym of the program's name.

In this period, Stanley Fried was a consultant to the U.S. Department of Labor on issues relating to employment of artists in the non-profit sector.  He assisted the staff of he City of Los Angeles CETA office in editing and rewrites to the CETA law in Congress which were written into legislation.

Between jobs in arts administration, he worked as a barista at the now infamous and greatly missed The Espresso Bar in Pasadena, California.

In the early 1980s, as Administrative Director of the Center for Music Experiment at the University of California, San Diego (now the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts), he sought funding for and produced an eight-week long, international contemporary arts festival entitled: Festival of the New Arts. Produced in coordination with Sushi Gallery in San Diego, this was the precursor of what became Neofest, an annual festival sponsored by Sushi Gallery. The Festival of the New Arts hosted performances by Diamanda Galas, Suzanne Lacey, and Michel Redolfi among others. During this period, he was also a grants panelist and workshop presenter for the California Arts Council. His work at this time is cited in the book Art That Pays: The Emerging Artist's Guide to Making a Living.

After a period of working as a free-lance grants writer and consultant to arts organizations, Stanley Fried opened Java Coffeehouse-Gallery in San Diego, California in 1986. It was in this period he began a series of performance-readings at Sushi Gallery and other venues throughout San Diego. These performances ended when he left San Diego in 1994 moving to Seattle, Washington. In this same period, Mr. Fried was a contributing writer to The Espresso newspaper in San Diego.

While in San Diego, the name of San Diego's Market Street was changed to Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive. A ballot initiative sponsored by business owners downtown was passed by the voters in 1987 to revert the name back to Market Street. In response, Stanley M Fried submitted an initiative of his own to name the newly completed and, as of yet, un-named Convention Center. The name proposed on his initiative was The San Diego White People's Convention Center. Some in the art community at that time were concerned that white supremacist groups in the area would latch on to the idea and support the initiative. They voiced their concerns that the initiative might pass. Mr. Fried responded by saying that the purpose of the initiative was to reveal San Diego for the racist community it was. He felt there would be no better way to demonstrate this than to have racists support such an innane name for a building. As he expected, the initiative did not get enough signatures to be placed on the ballot.

After a short stint as Director of Development for the Northwest Chamber Orchestra in Seattle, Fried decided to leave working in non-profit arts programs and transitioned into private sector work. Utilizing the business and technology skills he had gained, he successfully moved into working with software applications and database design. These were put to use in banking, medical research, and law offices in Seattle.

In 2002, he took a job with a legal case management software company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In that job, he had the opportunity to travel through most of the United States for work with private law firms, corporate counsels, and government agencies. He currently freelances as a consultant and trainer from his home in Albuquerque.