Gal Zaid is an actor, screenwriter, director, script doctor, and acting teacher. Zaid started out as an actor and in 1992, he won a Special Mention at the Theatronetto Theatre Festival for his performance in the monodrama, Man Himself. Next, for his role in Noa and Yosef El-Dor’s Bizarre Show, Zaid took home top honours at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Zaid was also a regular on Israel’s main repertoire theatre stages and directed a number of plays at the Beersheba Theatre, and the Yoram Loewenstein Performing Arts Studio where he is also a teacher. Highlights of film acting credits include Mars Turkey (aka Clean Sweep, Oded Davidoff, 2001) whose screenplay he co-wrote with Limor Nachmias, Giraffes (Tzahi Grad, 2001), Ben’s Biography (Dan Wolman, 2003), Foul Gesture (Tzahi Grad, 2006) whose screenplay he co-wrote with Ya’ackov Ayali, and Sweet Mud (Dror Shaul, 2006). Zaid’s performance in Dror Sabo’s 2006 Dead End won him a Wolgin Prize in the Best Actor category at the Jerusalem Film Festival.
In television, Zaid appeared in Ran Tal and Etgar Keret’s episode, Malka Lev Adom (‘queen red heart’) that was part of the miniseries, Short Stories about Love (1996). That performance won Zaid an Israeli Film Institute award. He also starred in the series Love Hurts, Prisoners of War (aka ‘hatufim’), The Orpheus Project, and Tzomet Miller (‘Miller junction’). As a screenwriter, Zaid created and wrote the series Michaela, Telenovela Inc. (aka ‘telenovela ba’am), The Champion, and The Orpheus Project.
Between 2007-2009 Zaid was the Keshet Media Group’s Drama Commissioning Head, which at the time, held the broadcasting franchise on Israel’s channel 2. In his job, Zaid was behind greenlighting the likes of political satire, Polishuk. Sitcom Ramzor (‘traffic light’), Prisoners of War, and the critically-acclaimed bi-ethnic dramedy, Arab Labor.
