Michael Rubenfeld is a performance maker, cultural producer, playwright and actor originally from Winnipeg and now residing in Toronto and Krakow, Poland. He is a Dora Award-nominated performer and playwright and has worked on stages across the country and in parts of the United States and Europe. His plays include Present Tense, Spain and the Dora-award nominated, My Fellow Creatures. Most recently, Michael co-created and continues to perform in three works with Marcin Wierzchowski: Alte Hajm / Old Home for the New Theatre in Poznan, Submergence for the Silesian Theatre in Katowice and their newest work, Time Shelter, for the National Old Theatre in Krakow. The former winning awards at the Polish National Theatre Awards and the Divine Comedy Festival of Poland’s best new works of 2022. His newest play, Poland is Not Yet Lost! created in collaboration with Dorota Abbe, will premiere in June 2024 as at Barakah Theatre in Krakow. His play The Woods, will be produced in 2026 in Poland and Canada.

Michael is the Executive Artistic Director of Selfconscious Productions, for whom he has co-created 4 projects with Sarah Garton Stanley, including The Book of Judith and We Keep Coming Back, which has toured across Canada, Poland and other parts of Europe. With Selfconscious, Michael also helped develop and produced Counting Sheep, by Mark and Marichka Marczyk. He produced the show at the 2016 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which then spawned a world-tour culminating in a 2-month production for London’s Vault Festival, directed by the Belarus Free Theatre. In 2017, Michael and Selfconscious Productions, in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts, founded CanadaHub; an all-Canadian curated venue at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In only three years, CanadaHub has become one of the most important venues for new work in Edinburgh, having won several major awards and countless accolades that have resulted in several world-tours for its productions.

From 2008 - 2016, Michael served as the Artistic Producer of the SummerWorks Performance Festival, where he helped present and produce over 300 new productions, and transformed the Festival into one of the most essential multi-arts performance festivals in Canada. In 2015, recognising a deficit in international performance in Toronto, Michael also co-founded Progress: An International Festival of Performance and Ideas. Produced by SummerWorks and The Theatre Centre, Progress brings together multiple Toronto-based performance presenters to curate and produce festival of international and local work.

In 2017, Michael also co-founded FestivALT, a alternative Jewish Arts and Activism Festival in Krakow, Poland. FestivALT operates as a multi-arts programme with a focus on investigating the complex contemporary Polish-Jewish landscape. In 2021 FestivALT opened it’s first permanent year-round venue. Michael has created several projects for FestivALT, including Strangers, with Jonathan Garfinkel and Lucky Jew, which is an ongoing public space projects satirising the problematic practice of selling images of Jews with coins “for luck” in Poland. The project has resulted in a partnership with the city of Krakow to transform how these images operate in the municipally controlled public space.

As an actor, Michael has performed on stages across Canada, America and Europe. He was in the Canadian premiere of Disgraced by Ayad Aktar (Mirvish Productions) as well as the Canadian and American premieres of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s, Our Class (Nasza Klasa). On film, Michael has been in major feature films such as Lucky Number Slevin, The Recruit and Fever Pitch and on tv, Suits, Reign, Queer as Folk, and more. Recently Michael performed in Wojciech Smarzowski’s newest film, Wesele 2 (The Wedding 2) and plays Roy Sanders on the popular Polish soap opera, Na Wspólnej. Michael has been called “one of Toronto’s most interesting men of the theatre” by The Globe and Mail’s Paula Citron, and and is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada.