Ben Donenberg

• Shakespeare

Ben Donenberg is the Founder and Artistic Director of the award-winning The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, a professional and community-based arts organization that presented its first Equity-contracted summer festival in 1986.

For more than thirty years, he annually adapted and directed a series of Shakespeare stagings, hosted by Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks, that featured many of the world’s finest actors, actresses and recording stars among them Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Sir Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Kenneth Branagh, William Shatner, Will Smith, Steve Martin, Cedric the Entertainer, Dule Hill, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Martin Short, Christina Applegate, Reba McIntyre, Natalie Cole, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Ewan MacGregor, Helen Hunt,
Jackson Browne, Lyle Lovett, Tracy Ulman, Eric Idle, Eugene Levy, and many others.

He served as a unit producer for Penny Marshall’s feature film The Renaissance Man, starring Danny DeVito. He is the playwright of the cult classic Starship Shakespeare, A Sort of Elizabethan Star Trek, first produced at Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, then in Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In April 2015, he directed the chamber opera Edwin, about the life of the 19th Century’s greatest Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, at The Players Club in NYC. His groundbreaking immersive production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest was designated by the Los Angeles Times as ‘one of the top nine productions’ of 2023 and The Shakespeare Center has also been designated by the Los Angeles Times as “one of the best places in Los Angeles to see plays and musicals.”

He has directed fully-staged, union contracted professional theatrical productions in theaters coast-to-coast and lectured on theater aesthetics for the University of Southern California, at the Huntington Library’s teacher training seminars, and with Shakespeare Center LA’s Will Power to Schools teacher training seminars. He teaches Shakespeare Performance and Scene Study Technique privately and at the California Institute for the Arts and the Art of Acting Conservatory.

The U.S. Senate’s unanimous approval of his 2006 Presidential appointment to the National Council on the Arts for six years, placed him in position to oversee the distribution of more than $600 million in federal grant funds to arts organizations throughout the United States. Subsequently, he was selected by the U.S. Secretary of Defense in 2012 to participate in the U.S. Department of Defense Joint Civilian
Orientation Conference which led to his creation of Veterans in Arts, a workforce development initiative that provides chronically unemployed veterans on-the-job stagecraft training. Donenberg has served as a theater grants panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

Donenberg is an alum of the Stella Adler Studio in NYC, The National Shakespeare Conservatory, the Juilliard School’s Drama Division, and the University of Southern California’s School of Philosophy. He has performed as an actor on and off Broadway, on television, and in film.