Shelly Skandrani is known for her critically acclaimed role in Showtime's popular Holocaust film 'The Devil's Arithmetic' starring Kirsten Dunst and Brittany Murphy, and produced by Dustin Hoffman and Mimi Rogers, Shelly had to shave her head on camera to portray a young bride who's wedding ceremony is destroyed when Nazi soldiers invade her Polish village and carry her and her community to the concentration camps.
"But it is the quiet, honest performances of young actors from the United States, Canada and Europe Brittany Murphy, Shelly Skandrani and Kirsten Dunst that carry this picture and infuse it with power." -New York Daily News
Shelly Skandrani was born in Tel Aviv, Israel and grew up in London, England and is often described as a mixture of Israeli passion and British refinement.
This mixture of extremes sparked her interest in anthropology and Shelly has spent a vast amount of my time traveling the world and studying different cultures, including ten months backpacking in South America, five months in India and has visited most of Europe and the USA, gathering stories and broadening her collection of ideas.
Shelly started acting on the stages of London at the age of nine, performing in dozens of plays, with over forty performances each, before moving onto Film and TV.
Shelly returned to Israel at eighteen and received classical training at the top performing arts school in Israel, Beit Zvi, for three intense years of fifteen hour days, where she graduated valedictorian with an immense understanding of the classical arts, their history, origins and possibilities.
While in high school Shelly studied creative writing and during Beit Zvi she directed a couple of scenes, these experiences fueled her understanding that her future lies in a much larger aspect of the creative process. Shelly started writing short stories and scripts and upon arriving in the USA took a writing class at UCLA extension.
Three of her short films have been produced and two of her feature films are gathering funding and scheduled to shoot in 2016. Shelly Skandrani's work promotes an empowerment of women and children who live through emotional hardships, some films are on a small family drama scale, some are more global and deal with larger issues such as war and child trafficking.
