Kenneth Mandel has served on the board of the Ensemble Studio Theatre since 1998 and served as the chairman of the board in the 2000s. He was responsible for introducing the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to EST during the production of Arthur Giron's play Flight resulting in the EST/Sloan partnership. This partnership has given the American stage hundreds of new plays and introduced audiences and artists alike to the wonders of science. Ken has been producing documentary films for nearly three decades winning an Emmy Award for George Marshall and the American Century and was nominated for two other Emmys and an Academy Award for An Essay on Matisse. His play Death of an Engineer was read at EST’s 2010 Octoberfest.