BEN BENDOR
Creative Director

Ben is a playwright, actor, and director who has performed for children and families since his own childhood in his native Israel. Among plays that Ben has written and developed for the stage are “The Dreydl Will Rock”, “Cruel Jewel” (based on Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace”), “A Wish on a Golden Fish”, and “Once Upon a Purim”, all produced and performed by the Children’s Theatre Center of NJ / ArtsEcho (founded by Ben and wife Sandra in 1987). Ben studied at the Actor’s Studio of Israel and has performed at both the Habimah National Theatre and the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv (two of Israeli’s most prestigious venues) in plays by Shakespeare, Faydeau, and Wilde as well as by new Israeli playwrights. While still in Israel, Ben produced and performed in the wildly popular show, “Flairy Tales”, later presented at New York City’s Encore Cabaret. In the mid-1990s, Ben developed a style of audience-participation performance that is both theatrical and curriculum-based. This led to Arithmetickles, an in-school assembly program which brings K-8 children, teachers and parents on stage to participate in highly entertaining math games and activities that vividly demonstrate that mathematics can be fun. To enhance the year-round effect of Arithmetickles in the classroom, Ben is currently creating math teacher DVDs featuring enjoyable, humorous games that take math and numbers off the page and into real life, and at the same time, improve student math skills.