Benjamin Mathes

Benjamin Mathes is the founder of Urban Confessional: A Free Listening Project. Currently in over 75 countries, their volunteers stand on street corners with signs that say "Free Listening" and provide compassionate, non-judgmental listening for anyone who needs to talk. Their work has been featured in over 40 national publications including the Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Fast Company, and The Big Think, as well as in over 30 international publications across 15 languages. 

He has been an actor for over 20 years. He has worked with artists such as Clint Eastwood, Alan Arkin, Sam Raimi, Bradley Cooper, Andy Garcia, and Chris Rock. He received his MFA in Acting from the University of California-Irvine. As a producer, his films MURDER OF A CAT (starring Greg Kinnear, JK Simmons), and the biopic, PELE (in partnership with Brian Grazer and Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment) both premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. As an instructor, he has taught at Auburn University, Cal State Northridge, University of San Diego, University of Lima, Peru, Catholic University of Lima, Theatre of Arts in Hollywood, UC-Irvine, and the Lincoln Center Director's Lab. His students have been nominated or awarded Tony, Emmy, Grammy, and Ovation Awards, and have appeared on Broadway, and in major motion pictures.

As an executive coach, he draws upon his 15 years of creative development, artistic leadership, and social entrepreneurship to help senior executives, management, and sales teams increase their creative capital in business leadership and team building, individual productivity, and presentation acumen. He is the author of two books detailing and investigating the creative process. The first, Thought Lozenges for Artists, is a daringly optimistic, "open-where-you-want" look into the creative process, and the second, CRASH: Unstuck Yourself, is a guided journal designed to directly combat the blocks holding us from our creative potential.