Paris, 13th District

Jacques Audiard is a French film director and screenwriter known for his compelling, often gritty, dramas. Born on April 30, 1952, in Paris, he initially worked as a screenwriter before transitioning to directing. Audiard achieved international recognition with The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), a tense, character-driven film that won multiple awards. In 2009, A Prophet earned him the Grand Prix at Cannes and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Audiard’s later works, like Rust and Bone (2012) and Dheepan (2015), continued to explore themes of identity and survival, with Dheepan winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Known for his strong, often unconventional characters, Audiard has established himself as one of contemporary cinema’s most distinctive voices.

Adrian Tomine was born in 1974 in Sacramento, California. He began self-publishing his comic book series Optic Nerve when he was sixteen, and in 1994 he received an offer to publish from Drawn & Quarterly. His comics have been anthologized in publications such as McSweeney’s, Best American Comics, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Both his graphic novel Shortcomings and his memoir The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist were named New York Times Notable Books of the year. His most recent books are Q&A and Shortcomings: A Screenplay. Since 1999, Tomine has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.

Leanne Shapton is a writer and painter. She is the author of Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, Guest Book: Ghost Stories, and the children’s book Toys Talking. Swimming Studies, recently republished by Picador/ FSG, won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is currently the Art editor at The New York Review of Books.