Orit Maftsir, a dancer, choreographer, and producer of the international bellydance festival in Eilat. Orit is one of the most requested artist in the world . She is teaching and performing around the globe, giving intense workshops on different subjects and full routine of costume changing stage shows in her glamorous and expressive style. Orit visited Sweeden, Germany, Russia, France, Poland, England, Ukreine, Holland, Korea, Spain, New Zealand, Turkey ,USA,Italy, Brazil and Switserland. All of Orit's tours are on "What's new" link, and her photos and video gallery is full with pictures and clips from her travels. She is the initiator and producer of the first belly-dance festival in Eilat that took place in January of 2005, co-produced with Yael Moav of the Arabesque Center for Belly Dancing in Jerusalem. The festival is now an international yearly event with over 900 dancers from all over the world visiting it every January, more on the event is on www.eilatfestival.com. The performances that Orit brought to the stage are among the most important and most fascinating in the field, ranging from classical, Egyptian music played by an orchestra, to modern remixes for her daring, theatrical shows. She teaches bellydancing and offers master-class workshops for professional dancers and was the first dance teacher in Israel to produce an instructional bellydance video. Orit has partaken in numerous Israeli and foreign television programs, action films, and commercials. A major Israeli news channel reviewed her show, “Star of the East,” and she is starring in a documentary film currently being filmed for another television station. Orit took up ballet at a very young age and later proceeded to study at an arts school where she studied visual art, theatre, and classical and modern ballet. She derived inspiration from ballet stories as well as movies, among which her favorite titles lay in the legend and musical genres. One distinguishes these influences today in Orit’s choreography, personal style, unique costumes, and in the imaginative way that she interprets music for dance. Orit is an industrial designer by trade; however, she decided to leave her successful career as a museum planner and designer in order to pursue a more personal expression of self through her art: dance. The experience that she gained in design, lighting, graphic art, and actual planning of sets and displays, assists her in every production in which she is the artistic director and stage designer. Orit encountered belly dancing at 26 years of age completely by chance. At the time she had no background or connection to Arab culture, but she immediately found in it all that she loved: emotion, imagination, creativity, and lots of drama. Orit connects both to the melodic, soft, and romantic side of Arabic music, especially the classic compositions of major Egyptian singers, as well as to the wilder heart-beat of the drums. She studied belly dancing at “Sahara City” in Tel Aviv, and concurrently conducted her own research on the different forms of the dance through Arabic movies and instructional videos. Later, she began to travel to Cairo to take belly-dancing lessons, as well as to acquire a respectable understanding of Arabic culture. She took lessons with her favorite contemporary dancer, Randa Kamel, with Hisham Salah, the trainer of the Mahmud Reda troupe, and with Diana Mahiou, with whom she became friends. Within a short period of time, after partaking in a number of big, joint shows, she brought her own personal creation to the stage in a performance called “Nur al Amar.” This performance, at the Suzan Dalal Center in Tel Aviv, was a gesture to those spectacular Arabic movies from the 1950s that Orit would watch, featuring the participation of an orchestra from Nazareth and an accompanying troupe of dancers. She worked with the finest Arabic musicians from Israel and traveled with her show nation-wide. From that first performance, Orit has not stopped dreaming and fulfilling her vision of belly dancing, surpassing expectations at each consecutive production. She is famous in the belly dance scene and was honored with an article in the Gilded Serpent, an American online magazine for Middle Eastern performing arts, in which she represents dance in Israel. Orit’s deep love of belly dancing pushes her forward and encourages her to research and expand the borders of the genre so that it may enter the theatre, modern dance, and mainstream dance festivals. She is paving the path for the future generation of belly dancers that desires to transcend the purely recreational domain and enter the realm of art and personal creation.