Benoit Mouchart

Benoît Mouchart (born 1976 in Versailles) is a French writer and curator. From 2003 to 2013, he was artistic director of the cultural programming of Angoulême International Comics Festival, in France.

Biography After having obtained in 1999 a masters of Literature in the Sorbonne (Paris IV), he becomes French professor for high school programme, intend to devote itself to journalism. Critic (Bang! and 9e art), he contributes its share to the special issues devoted to the comics of the French magazines Géo, Télérama, Science et Vie and Beaux-arts magazine. He is also the author of several books, of which an investigation into the ghost writer of the Belgian school Jacques Van Melkebeke and, in collaboration with François Rivière, a biography of the creator of "Blake and Mortimer", Edgar P. Jacobs. Since 2004, he animates the two-monthly meetings "the territories of the comic strip" for the BPI of the Pompidou Centre. With Areski Belkacem and Zep, he developed also the original concept of the "Concert de dessins" ("concerts of drawings"), who propose creation, on live, on large screen and in music, of an original comic strip... Under its artistic direction, the Festival of Angoulême considerably consolidated its opening to the international scene and the young creation, while producing a great number of events apart from Angoulême, in particular with Paris (exhibitions produced for the Musée de l’Homme, Mondial de l’automobile or Jardin d’acclimatation). Especially, Benoît Mouchart knows to cross arts, through exhibitions, meetings and spectacles where the comics are confronted, without any complex, with other artistic forms: music, cinema, literature, contemporary art, inter alia. Author of an essay about the French novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette, he published in 2008 a monograph devoted to the French singer and poet Brigitte Fontaine. Since 2013, he's directing Comics department for Casterman, Tintin's publisher.