Board Director, Co-founder
DeDe Jacobs Komisar has been active in theater since a young age, as an actor, writer, and director. Before helping to establish BaMatMaBat, she received her B.A. with Honors in International and Intercultural Studies from Goucher College, developed and ran Jews for Judaism's JTTV Live! interactive teen theater group in Baltimore, and co-founded the Jewish Theatre Workshop in Baltimore, which is now in its 4th season. Credits with BaMatMaBat include: Teudat Zehut (co-writer, co-director), A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer (director), Doubt (director), Voices from Our Side of the Curtain (actor, co-writer, director), and The Vagina Monologues (actor, director). While living in Israel, DeDe worked full-time as a grantwriter and also acted with other Jerusalem English-speaking theater companies, including JEST (Norma, The Value of Names; Margot, The Diary of Anne Frank) and Merkaz Hamagshimim's Center Stage Theater (Bobbi, Some Girl(s)). Now pursuing an M.F.A. in Theater Management at the Yale School of Drama, DeDe continues to be involved with BaMatMaBat wherever possible. She lives with her husband Yaakov and two cats in New Haven, Connecticut.
Executive Director, Co-founder
Talia Weiss is thrilled to be nearly finished with her Masters Degree in Expressive Therapy and Mental Health Counseling with a certification in Psychodrama from Lesley University. Talia has acted in many theatrical performances, both in the states and then in Jerusalem after moving in 2007. With BaMatMaBat, she has mainly served as producer and organizer, but also cowrote and codirected Teudat Zehut, and has acted in Eve Ensler's A Memory A Monologue A Rant and a Prayer and The Vagina Monologues. In summer 2009 Talia lead four Street Theater workshops in Tanzania, East Africa. Additionally, Talia works as a Psychodramatist at Herzog Psychiatric hospital and BCVS seminary for girls with eating disorders.
Project Manager
Molly Livingstone was born to be in the spotlight- or at least that’s what she thinks. Raised in Hollywood, from a young age she experienced fame and fortune, as it happened around her but never to her. Although she always wanted to be a movie star, she quickly learned that most actors and actresses end up waiters and substitute teachers in LA rather than on the set. That said, she translated her love of acting into a BA in Broadcast Journalism and continues her passion of acting on the side, through plays, improv and film sketches. That same drive has brought her to the mercy of BaMat MaBat where she infuses her acting, writing and producing skills into successful projects and productions for the organization. Or at least get to be on stage and enjoy the spotlight.
Actors
Rachel Beitsch arrived in Israel from Baltimore, MD, ten years ago and is still here. When she isn't working as an editor for The Jerusalem Post, she studies jujitsu and any other martial art that comes her way, and hopes to get her master's in English Lit sometime before she's 50. Her modest acting career with BamatMabat includes Teudat Zehut (2008), A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer (2008), Doubt (2008), and Voices from Our Side of the Curtain (2008, 2009). She has also played in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds (2005) and Much Ado about Nothing (2007) and The Action Against Sol Schumann (2006) with other Jerusalem theater groups. She likes Ben and Jerry's, Terry Pratchett, and physics, hopes to eventually make money off her fiction writing, and wants to be a black-belt literature professor when she grows up.
