Michael Rubenfeld is a Canadian-Polish actor, playwright, director, and producer based in Poland for the past nine years. His Jewish grandparents survived the Holocaust in Poland before emigrating. As an actor, he appeared in the Canadian and U.S. premieres of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class, and in films with Al Pacino, Colin Farrell, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, and Drew Barrymore. In Poland, he’s been seen in Wojtek Smarzowski’s The Weddingand Patryk Vega’s Putin.
His plays have been staged in Canada, the U.S., and across Europe. He directed Toronto’s SummerWorks Performance Festival for eight years, producing over 300 shows, and founded the award-winning CanadaHub showcase at the Edinburgh Fringe. With Magda Koralewska, he co-founded FestivALT, focused on contemporary Jewish and Polish art.
He has co-written four plays with director Marcin Wierzchowski: Alte hajm/The Old House at the New Theater in Poznań, Submergence at the Silesian Theater in Katowice, Time Shelter at the Old Theater in Kraków, and FORD at the Wanda Siemaszkowa Theatre in Rzeszów. All remain in repertory. Alte hajm and Submergence were finalists in Poland’s national competition for contemporary theatre, and Alte hajm earned performance awards at Kraków’s Divine Comedy Festival.
He also co-wrote, directed, and performs in Poland Is Not Yet Lost with Dorota Abbe, currently running in repertory in Kraków. Next he will perform in, If I Had a Gun, I Would Take Them All Down, by Piotr Armianovski, premiering in June 2025, followed by his own play, The Woods at Teatr Polski in Bydgoszcz in May 2026.
