Ed Herbstman

RolesCo-Founder

Ed Herbstman is a Chicago-raised improviser, director, writer, and educator who trained under Del Close at ImprovOlympic, performed with the Second City National Touring Company, co-founded iO West in Los Angeles, served three years as an NYPD officer in Brooklyn, and co-founded Magnet Theater in New York City in 2005 alongside Armando Diaz and Shannon Manning. A longtime teacher and faculty member at Magnet, he has also taught at Syracuse University and Columbia University, and his teaching philosophy centers on present-moment confidence and generosity of spirit.

Career

Ed Herbstman grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and graduated from Northwestern University. His improvisational training began at ImprovOlympic Chicago, where he was performing on Harold teams by approximately age 17, studying under Del Close during the formative period of the Harold's codification as the primary long-form format. He also performed with the Second City National Touring Company and taught at ImprovOlympic, and appeared at the Aspen Comedy Festival.

Herbstman relocated to Los Angeles with his sketch comedy group Bitter Noah. In Los Angeles he became a founding faculty member of iO West, the Los Angeles branch of Charna Halpern's ImprovOlympic that expanded the Harold training tradition to the West Coast. He performed in television pilots and created and wrote shows for MTV and VH1 during this period.

He subsequently moved to New York City. Rather than continuing immediately in comedy, Herbstman served three years as an officer with the New York Police Department, assigned to the 70th Precinct in Flatbush, Brooklyn. He returned to the entertainment industry as a contributing writer on Season 2 of HBO's Da Ali G Show. He served as head writer at Dandelion, a branded entertainment company, where he produced the campaign MeetTheLuckyOnes.com for Lincoln Mercury, recognized as one of Adweek's Top Ten Ad Campaigns of 2004. He also created content for P&G, Ford, Cadbury, and L'Oreal.

In March 2005, Herbstman co-founded Magnet Theater with Armando Diaz and Shannon Manning, three Chicago-trained friends who had studied together under Del Close. Magnet, based in Manhattan, developed a curriculum and performance schedule that became one of New York's most active improv institutions, with particular strength in musical improvisation and home to the New York Musical Improv Festival. Herbstman has performed in more than twenty Magnet productions including The Armando Diaz Experience, Connect 4, and Mantzoukas Brothers.

Herbstman teaches improvisation at Magnet and has served on the faculty of Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts. He has taught performance improvisation for business communication at Columbia University. As a commercial actor he has appeared in campaigns for FedEx and Chase. He is a volunteer firefighter in Hastings-On-Hudson, New York, where he lives with his family.

Historical Context

Magnet Theater's founding in March 2005 by three Del Close students arrived at a moment when New York's improv landscape was expanding beyond the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, which had been the dominant institution for Chicago-lineage long-form in New York since its 1999 founding. Herbstman, Diaz, and Manning's decision to create a second major long-form institution offered New York performers and students an alternative training environment with a slightly different aesthetic emphasis while sustaining the Harold as a shared central form.

Herbstman's three-year NYPD career, which interrupted what might otherwise have been a more linear comedy trajectory, is frequently cited in accounts of his teaching philosophy as evidence that the skills of improvisation, attentiveness to other people, and adaptability to unpredictable situations have practical applications well beyond the stage. This biographical fact grounds his teaching in a broader claim about improv's relevance to lived professional experience.

Teaching Philosophy

Ed Herbstman's teaching approach centers on present-moment confidence and what he describes as playing 'close to the moment': attending fully to what is actually happening in a scene rather than to what a performer intends to make happen. He emphasizes that being 'decent and good' is more radical in improv than pursuing shock tactics or elaborate game moves, and that genuine generosity toward scene partners is both an ethical and a practical position. His core principle, 'Don't be a jerk,' articulates the relational ethics of improvisational performance in deliberately plain terms. His own training under Del Close at ImprovOlympic, combined with his NYPD service and his work in branded entertainment, informs a teaching practice that regards improv skills as applicable and valuable in any professional context that requires attentive human interaction.

Legacy

Magnet Theater's sustained operation and growth since 2005, with Herbstman as a founding faculty member and ongoing performer, has made it one of the two or three primary institutions for Harold-tradition long-form improvisation in New York City. The theater's New York Musical Improv Festival has established it as the country's leading venue for the musical improv form.

Herbstman's teaching, both at Magnet and at Syracuse and Columbia, has reached practitioners and students across performance and non-performance contexts. His teaching philosophy, which emphasizes playing without fear and being genuinely present for scene partners rather than performing technique, reflects the Del Close tradition's core emphasis on authentic attention as the fundamental improvisational virtue. His work in branded entertainment and corporate communication workshops has further demonstrated how the improvisational skill set transfers to professional contexts outside of performance, expanding the practical reach of the long-form Harold tradition beyond the stage.

Early Life and Training

Ed Herbstman grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and graduated from Northwestern University. He began training at ImprovOlympic Chicago in his teens, performing on Harold teams by approximately age 17.