La Femme Advisory Board Members: Ben Feldman, Lori Rotskoff, and Molly Smith
Ben Feldman, Esq. is a principal of the law firm Feldman, Golinski + Reedy PLLC., practicing in film, theater, television, publishing, fine art, digital media/start-ups, and other intellectual property and corporate transactions. His clientele includes financiers, artists, producers, talent agencies, venues, casting directors, and non-profits.
Ben’s live stage producing credits encompass Broadway & Off, revivals & new works, and musicals & plays. Nominated twice, Ben is the recipient of a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical for Pippin and was the production counsel for Memphis, which won Best Musical. His clients have won for Best Orchestrations, Best Score, Best Sound Design, and Best Book of a Musical and have been nominated for Best Actress. Other engagements as production counsel include Dames at Sea (last season) and Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 (this season).
As attorney, Ben recently sold E-Team to Netflix and also has sold other documentaries to PBS, HBO, and NBC. As production counsel, his documentaries have won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance – and have been nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar. Ben has been production counsel for many fictional films, ranging from Kissing Jessica Stein, Heights (Merchant Ivory), Nicole Kidman’s Rabbit Hole, and Equity. As a motion picture producer, recent credits include The Understudy.
He has served on the boards of directors for Ars Nova, the Hourglass Group, and the Chase Brock Experience. He currently serves on the Board of Advisors for Symphony Space on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Ben is an active fundraiser and volunteer for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. He was published in the Commercial Theater Institute Guide to Producing Plays and Musicals.
In the 1990’s, Ben graduated Yale College (Summa Cum Laude) and NYU Law. Currently, Ben resides in downtown Manhattan, Gloucester, MA, and South Beach, FL. An avid tennis fan and player, he also enjoys collecting the work of up-and-coming painters and photographers.
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Lori Rotskoff is a cultural historian, teacher, writer, and public speaker. She earned a B.A. in History from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. Since 2005, she has taught seminar classes for adults at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the 92nd Street Y, and the Scarsdale Adult School. Ms. Rotskoff is co-editor of When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made (2012) and author of Love on the Rocks: Men, Women, and Alcohol in Post-World War II America (2002). Her essays and book reviews have appeared in the Women’s Review of Books, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Reviews in American History, and the Journal of American History. She has received fellowships and grants from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Historical Society, the Sophia Smith Collection, and the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She serves on the Board of Directors of Cool Culture, a non-profit that provides low-income families with free access to museums and cultural institutions throughout New York City. She is also a board member of Impact100 Westchester, a women’s collective philanthropy. She lives in Larchmont, NY with her husband and two sons.
Molly Smith has served as Artistic Director of Arena Stage since 1998. Her directing credits include Carousel, Oliver!, The Originalist, Fiddler on the Roof, Camp David, Mother Courage and Her Children, Oklahoma!, A Moon for the Misbegotten, My Fair Lady, The Great White Hope, The Music Man, Orpheus Descending, Legacy of Light, The Women of Brewster Place, Cabaret, An American Daughter, South Pacific, Agamemnon and His Daughters, Coyote Builds North America, All My Sons, and How I Learned to Drive at Arena Stage. Her directorial work has also been seen at The Old Globe, Asolo Repertory, Berkeley Repertory, Trinity Repertory, Canada’s Shaw Festival, Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, Montreal’s Centaur Theatre, and Perseverance Theater in Juneau, Alaska, which she founded and ran from 1979-1998. Molly has been a leader in new play development for over 30 years. She is a great believer in first, second, and third productions of new work and has championed projects including How I Learned to Drive, Passion Play, a cycle, and Next to Normal. She has worked alongside playwrights Sarah Ruhl, Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, Lawrence Wright, Karen Zacarías, John Murrell, Eric Coble, Charles Randolph-Wright, and many others. She led the re-invention of Arena Stage, focusing on the architecture and creation of the Mead Center for American Theater and positioning Arena Stage as a national center for American artists. During her time with the company, Arena Stage has workshopped more than 100 productions, produced 37 world premieres, staged numerous second and third productions, and been an important part of nurturing eight projects that went on to have a life on Broadway. In 2014, Molly made her Broadway debut directing The Velocity of Autumn, following its critically acclaimed run at Arena Stage. She was awarded honorary doctorates from American University and Towson University.