Michael Rubenfeld is a writer, dramaturg, performance maker, and cultural producer originally from Winnipeg, now based between Toronto, Kraków and Warsaw. His work sits at the intersection of theatre, history, and Jewish cultural memory, shaped by an ongoing engagement with the political and cultural histories of Poland and Eastern Europe.
Working across theatre, text, and interdisciplinary performance, Rubenfeld’s practice moves between the personal and the historical, often drawing on archival material, lived experience, and contemporary politics. His work is concerned with how history persists in the present—how identity, memory, and narrative are shaped, contested, and performed. Rather than offering fixed positions, his projects often sit in ambiguity, holding competing truths and resisting simplified moral frameworks.
His recent collaborations with director Marcin Wierzchowski—Alte Hajm / Old Home (New Theatre, Poznań), Submergence (Silesian Theatre, Katowice), Time Shelter (National Old Theatre, Kraków) and FORD (Wanda Siemeskowa Theatre, Rzeszów)—extend his ongoing exploration of memory, displacement, and contemporary European identity. Alte Hajm / Old Home received recognition at Poland’s national theatre awards and the Divine Comedy Festival. His newest play, Poland is Not Yet Lost! (with Dorota Abbe), premiered in Kraków, and The Woods will be produced in Poland in 2026 at the Polish Theatre in Bydgoszcz.
Rubenfeld has co-created multiple works with Sarah Garton Stanley through Selfconscious Productions, including The Book of Judith and We Keep Coming Back, which has toured across Canada and Europe. As a producer, he brought Mark and Marichka Marczyk’s Counting Sheep to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it became an international success, winning major awards and launching a global tour that culminated in an extended run at London’s Vault Festival with the Belarus Free Theatre.
In 2017, he co-founded CanadaHub, a curated platform for Canadian performance at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Under his leadership, CanadaHub quickly became one of the most prominent international venues at the festival, earning multiple awards and serving as a launchpad for Canadian productions touring globally.
From 2008 to 2016, he served as Artistic Producer of the SummerWorks Performance Festival in Toronto, where he helped develop and present over 300 new works and expand the festival’s international scope. He is also a co-founder of Progress: An International Festival of Performance and Ideas.
In Poland, Rubenfeld co-founded FestivALT, a Jewish arts and activism festival in Kraków dedicated to interrogating contemporary Polish-Jewish identity and memory. His projects for FestivALT include Strangers (with Jonathan Garfinkel), Poland is not yet lost!, If I had a gun, I’d take them all down, and Lucky Jew, an ongoing public intervention examining antisemitic imagery in Polish public space.
As an actor, he has performed across Canada, the United States, and Europe, including in productions of Disgraced (Mirvish Productions) and Our Class (Canadian Stage). His film and television work includes appearances in Lucky Number Slevin, The Recruit, and Fever Pitch, as well as series such as Suits, Queer as Folk, and Polish productions including 1670, Wesele and Na Wspólnej.
He is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada.