About

Mark Benhard

While I’ve enjoyed a 30-year professional career serving in senior marketing, communications and PR roles at multiple Fortune-500 and global organizations, playing piano and composing music has been my life-long passion. In college at UCLA, I minored in Music Composition for Motion Pictures & TV and studied under the Academy Award-nominated composer David Raksin, known as the “grandfather of film music”. In my youth, I was taught piano and the art of composing by Matt Dennis, who wrote Angel Eyes for Frank Sinatra and was in the legendary Tommy Dorsey Band. Over the years, I’ve composed over 100 original songs, with copyrights filed at the US Library of Congress. For the past decade, I’ve also been working on a unique Broadway musical script called Annabelle and The Sandman, which includes 17 of my original songs. Prior to Covid, we held a successful Table Read in New York City with 22 Broadway actors organized by the 2-time winning Tony producer Margot Astrachan. My dream is to bring it to the theatre someday soon. Currently, I play piano on Thursdays from 6-10pm in the upstairs lounge at The District, the best steakhouse in beautiful downtown Pensacola.