Artists in Residence

Marc Lévy is a renowned French novelist based in New York.

He shared with the Grade 8 students the power of imagination and creativity. Together, they created a booklet that brings together all the students’ written works, both individual and collective.

Lou Nodet is a young carnettiste discovered in the film Dans les pas de Lou by Hervé Tiberghien.

The Grade 10 students drew inspiration from her incredible adventures and techniques to create their own travel sketchbooks, capturing the heart of New York City.

Serge Bloch is a French illustrator, born in 1956 in Colmar.

He attended the Claude Lapointe illustration workshop at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg. A star of children’s and teen literature in France, he is notably the illustrator of the Max et Lili and Zouk series, and the creator of the SamSam series.

He also works for prestigious newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Le Monde, Télérama, Le Nouvel Observateur, Libération, etc.

Empathy and opening up to a diverse world is essential especially for children at an age when they are discovering themselves and the world around them.

The residency will give students an opportunity to share their compassionate vision of the world by creating collages on the theme “I Am a Child  of the World”.

About Delphine Diallo

Delphine Diallo is a Brooklyn-based French and Senegalese visual artist and photographer. She graduated from the Académie Charpentier School of Visual Art in Paris in 1999 before working in the music industry for seven years as a special effect motion artist, video editor and graphic designer. In 2008, she moved to New York City to explore her own practice after giving up a cooperate Art Director role in Paris.

Diallo was mentored by acclaimed photographer and artist of Peter Beard who was impressed by her creativity and spontaneity before offering her to collaborate for the Pirelli calendar photo shoot in Botswana. Inspired by new environments on this trip, she decided to return to her father’s home city of Saint-Louis in Senegal to start her own vision quest.Where ever she can, Diallo combines artistry with activism, pushing the many possibilities of empowering women, youth, and cultural minorities through visual provocation. Diallo uses analog, digital photography and collages  as she continues to explore new mediums.

Throughout this month-long residence, Zenatti led students on a literary journey around the theme of the encounter – more specifically the absence of encounters, echoing spring 2020 when students, like the rest of the country, where mandated to stay home.

Students recorded their written works to present to their parents during a final presentation which concluded the residency.

About Valérie Zenatti

Valérie Zenatti is a French author, screenwriter and translator. Born in the south of France, she moved to Israel, when she was 13 and later completed the mandatory national service, which inspired her novel, When I was a Soldier (2002). Zenatti now lives in Paris.

Her books for children and young adults, largely inspired by her personal experiences, are concerned both with the experiences of children and youth cultures and the everyday lives of young people amid the cultural, political, and religious conflicts between Gaza and Jerusalem. She is the author of A Bottle in the Gaza Sea (2005), which was also turned into a movie.

This residency introduced the students to comics, so that they could later use these skills in other disciplines or for other projects.

More specifically, the objective was to give students notions of comic book narration, allowing them to make a comic strip (/ page) at the end of the workshop, alone or in groups. The boards presented a full story, or were the first of a longer story, provided it forms a cohesive whole.

The project is part of language teaching, and addresses themes related to cultural identity, to the encounter through culture and art, to the relationship between dominant culture and counter-culture…

About Maël

Maël is a cartoonist, screenwriter, illustrator, graphic designer. Since his debut in 2003, he has published around 20 comic books. His career as a designer took a turn with the publication, at Futuropolis, in collaboration with Kris, of the much noticed Notre Mère la Guerre, a four-volume series which is now a reference among the stories devoted to the Great War, followed by the one-shot documentary Revenants directed by Olivier Morel.

He had previously drawn L’encre du passé (Dupuis/Aire Libre), Dans la Colonie Pénitentiaire (Delcourt), Les Rêves de Milton (Dupuis/Aire Libre), Tamino (Glénat), and participated in numerous collective works. In 2014, he published the album Entre les lignes with Daniel Maghen editions, produced in collaboration with graphic designer Vincent Odin. Then he found Kris with whom he directed the series Notre Amérique. Maël recently collaborated as an illustrator on director Raoul Peck’s documentary series “Exterminate all the brutes”.