Samuel Avital is a mime artist. He has also taught and Kabbalah. He was born in Sefrou, near Fez in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. He moved to a kibbutz in Israel when he was fourteen. From 1958 he studied dance and drama at the Sorbonne in Paris, and also mime under Étienne Decroux, Marcel Marceau and Jean-Louis Barrault. He moved to the United States, and in 1971 started a school of mime, , in Boulder, Colorado, where an annual international summer mime workshop was held.