Ella Okhotin

Ella’s love for theater was born with her on the day she was born, the daughter of a father who spent his entire life in theater as a director, creator, actor and theater teacher in the USSR and in Israel.

Theater is a new language for her that she creates on stage.

Ella is deaf, 42, and comes from a deaf family. She and her partner have two children, Lenny and Amy.

Her mother tongue is Russian Sign Language, but she is also fluent both in Israeli Sign Language and Hebrew. Ella studied directing and theater teaching at the Performing Arts Center of the Kibbutzim College of Education, and while still a student joined the University of Haifa’s Ebisu Sign Language Theater Lab.

As an actress and creator, she has participated in plays and performed throughout the country, at the Acre Festival, in New York and at the International Festival of Deaf Artists in France.

Today, Ella is a theater teacher at the Niv School for the Deaf, as part of special education in Tel Aviv and in Na Laga’at in the Performing Arts course’s track for the deaf.