Lynsey Addario is an American photojournalist who regularly works for The New York Times, National Geographic, and Time Magazine. Since September 11, 2001, Addario has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Darfur, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She photographs feature stories on humanitarian and human rights issues across the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa with a specific focus on women’s issues.

© Claude Cruells, photographe

For fifteen years, Frédérique Bedos has been a TV and radio presenter in France and abroad. In 2010, she jumps in the unknown by creating “The Humble Heroes Project” an NGO of information that aims at Inspiring to Act and to present the story of all these people who show us that everything is possible. La petite fille à la balançoire is Frederique Bedos’ book which retraces her life and explains what is at the origin of her commitment. In 2014, Mr François Hollande, the French President, chooses Frédérique Bedos to join the sponsorship comittee of ”France is committed”, the presidential project dedicated to social innovation.

Karol Beffa was awarded the SACEM Grand Prix de la musique symphonique in 2017 for his lifetime achievement. He is the author, with Fields medal-winning mathematician Cedric Villani, of Les coulisses de la création published by Flammarion in 2017. Lecturing in musicology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure since 2004, he was invited to occupy the prestigious Professorship for Artistic Creation at the Collège de France in 2012-2013. He has also been composer in residence for the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse from 2006 to 2009 and received a Victoire de la Musique as best composer of the year 2013.

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Marc is a PwC Partner in the Banking and Capital Markets group.. He has over 20 years experience with PwC in both France and in the UK in various industry sectors. He leads Assurance and advisory engagements on technology, risk and controls.

Executive producer and creator of scripted drama, as well as a media entrepreneur, Alex Berger has produced TV shows both in the UK and in France. Former Vice President of Canal+ Group under Pierre Lescure, executive committee member and Chairman & CEO of CanalNumédia & VivendiNet, his career has been devoted to premium media strategy and content production.
He is currently executive producer of Le Bureau des Légendes (The Bureau) for Canal+ and developing other US based scripted drama series.

Anna Bernard’s research is concerned with the literature and culture of anti-colonial struggles that have persisted after the formal end of European imperialism. She is the author of Rhetorics of Belonging: Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine (2013) and co-editor of Debating Orientalism (2013) and What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say (2015). She is currently working on a book called International Solidarity and Culture: Nicaragua, South Africa, Palestine, 1975-1990.

Myriam Boussahba is Professor in British History at Université Paris Diderot. Her scholarly interests lie in the area of British and international feminism with Suffrage Outside Suffragism (2007) and Genre&Histoire14 (2014). Historical consultant for TV film “Les Suffragettes” (Michèle Dominici, 2012), she recently published on feminist congresses held alongside international exhibitions, “L’autopromotion des femmes…”, Relations internationales 164 (2016), coedited Women in International Exhibitions 1876-1937 (2017) and co-authored L’Europe des femmes (2017). She is currently revising a book-length biography of suffragist feminist Teresa Billington-Greig.

© Frédéric Arnould

Laura Cahen is an up and coming French singer-songwriter from Nancy, whose subtle songs filled with poetry are powered by a playful reinvention of the French language with an encapsulating dream-pop spirit. She was a FAIR laureate in 2013 and noticed by Les Inouïs du Printemps de Bourges.

Dr Simon Colton is a Professor in Digital Games Technologies (Falmouth) and Computational Creativity (Goldsmiths), specialising in Artificial Intelligence. He was previously a reader in Computational Creativity at Imperial College, London.
He leads research projects which advance and utilise AI techniques for creative purposes, with applications in pure mathematics, science, visual arts, creative language and videogame design. He has published nearly 200 papers on these topics and his research has won national and international awards.

Joan Concannon created the University of York‘s first directorate of external relations in 2009. A passionate advocate of the importance of communicating the transformative power of education and research, she has co-founded the York Festival of Ideas whose mission is to educate, entertain and inspire the general public about ideas and education.

Ros’s interests include women documentary filmmakers, political and campaigning film and the documentary and fiction work of Ken Loach. She has been a cataloguer, acquisitions officer and curator since she joined the British Film Institute in 1992. She is leader of the BFI project This Working Life, which celebrates Britain’s coalmining, shipbuilding and steelmaking heritage on film.

Jonathan Cross is a Professor of Musicology at the University of Oxford and Tutor in Music at Christ Church. He is Research Associate in the research team Analyse des pratiques musicales at IRCAM, in Paris. He has written, lectured and broadcasted widely on the twentieth-century and on contemporary music. His publications include the highly acclaimed The Stravinsky Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Dame Athene Donald is a Professor of Experimental physics in Cambridge since 1998. Her research is in the general field of soft matter and physics at the interface with biology; she has published over 250 papers in these fields. As well as various prizes from the IOP and Royal Society, she won the 2009 L’Oreal/Unesco Laureate for Europe award. She was appointed DBE in the 2010 Birthday Honours for services to Physics.

Tracy shot to fame when she skippered the first all-female crew in the 1989/90 Whitbread Round the World Race. In 1990 Tracy was awarded the MBE and in 1998 she put together the first all-female crew to attempt the fastest non-stop circumnavigation by sail. In 2011 Maiden was found rotting in the Seychelles and in 2014, Tracy began raising funds in order to rescue Maiden and bring her home to the UK. Once restored to her former glory, Maiden, an iconic piece of British Maritime History, will embark on a three-year world tour to raise funds for the charity Maiden Education who enable and facilitate girls’ education.

Aldo Faisal is the Director of the Behaviour Analytics Lab at the Data Science Institute (London) and Associate Professor for Neurotechnology at the Dept. of Bioengineering and Dept. of Computing at Imperial College London. He is an Associate Group Head at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences and a honorary senior fellow of the FMRIB Center (a multi-disciplinary neuroimaging research facility) at Oxford University.

Magdalen Fisher is Executive Director at Sadler’s Wells. She also directly manages the teams responsible for the artistic programme, producing and touring. Before joining the theatre in 2015, Magdalen was Development Director at English Heritage for over 10 years. Previously, Magdalen held leadership positions at the Zoological Society of London (2002-2003) and the Museum of London (1999-2002). Having trained at the Royal Academy of Music, her career began in live music and, between 1989 and 1998, she held positions in communications and development at Wigmore Hall and Shakespeare’s Globe.

© Dr Arno Lam

Beginning his career on French TV in 1998, Grégory Fitoussi crossed the Channel to much acclaim in 2005 when the thriller series Spiral (BBC4) went viral in over 70 countries including the UK. Since then he has worked on numerous international projects disclosing the diversity of his talent as an actor including other TV series such as Mr Selfridge (ITV), Spin (More4) and Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands (ITV) and the long-features World War Z and Hostile for which he won his first Best Actor award at the New York City Horror Film Festival.

After ten years at the BBC making arts documentaries, Daisy Goodwin created a number of programmes including Grand Designs and ran Silver River productions from 2005 to 2012. Daisy has written two novels My Last Duchess and The Fortune Hunter, which were both New York Times bestsellers. In 2014 Daisy was commissioned to write her first screenplay, Victoria, an 8 part series about the early life of Queen Victoria for ITV and WGBH Masterpiece Theatre. She is now working on Season 3.

Andy Harries is Chief Executive and co-founder of Left Bank Pictures, a multi award-winning, UK-based film and television production company. Established in 2007, and a majority stake acquired by Sony in 2012, Left Bank Pictures has produced a huge range of award-winning TV and film including the multi award winning NETFLIX show, The Crown, written by Peter Morgan and directed by Stephen Daldry.
Prior to establishing Left Bank Pictures, Harries was Controller of Drama, Comedy and Film for Granada Productions. During this period, he produced countless British classics including Prime Suspect, Cold Feet and The Royle Family, winning Golden Globes, Emmys and BAFTAs and receiving an Academy Award nomination as a producer of The Queen. In 2007, Andy was awarded the Special Achievement award by BAFTA and, in May 2011, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Television Society for outstanding contribution to the broadcasting industry.
Harries is also a theatre producer whose credits include the Tony and Olivier award-winning play The Audience, which starred both Helen Mirren and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Dr Tristram Hunt became Director of the V&A in February 2017. Formerly the Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central, he served as the Labour Party’s Shadow Secretary of State for Education. Between 2001-2010, Tristram was a Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London, and a history broadcaster for the BBC and Channel 4. He is the author of several books, most recently Ten Cities That Made an Empire (2014).

Karolina Jakaitė has a PhD and is a design historian and researcher at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. In 2015 Art in Translation published her article about Lithuanian Pavilion at London Exhibition in 1968. She has written articles, edited books and catalogues on Lithuanian design, organised conferences, seminars and exhibitions, and implemented various design management projects in Lithuania and abroad. Her professional interests include topics from design and culture history, design and identity, national exhibitions, design management, design and innovations.

Marian Lacombe is a French Independent documentary filmmaker who filmed and interviewed the 60 extraordinary women featured in The Female Lead video project. She has worked as a reporter, anchorwoman, and editor-in-chief on daily news and magazines for the private French television channel M6. She directed documentaries on filmmakers, choreographers, and designers such as Mira Nair, Agnès Varda, Robert Altman, Philippe Decouflé, and Christian Lacroix.
 In 2012, for the London Olympic Games, Marian and Brigitte Lacombe collaborated on HEY’YA, a book and exhibition at Sotheby’s about Arab Women in Sport.

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Amy Lamé is London’s first Night Czar. She co-founded and chairs RVT Future, a voluntary LGBT and community group campaigning to preserve the iconic Royal Vauxhall Tavern. She is at the very heart of the conversation about venues under threat of closure in London. She served as Mayoress of Camden in 2010-2011, and spent her year highlighting the history and culture of live music and nightlife in the borough. Amy is a familiar presence on TV, in print and has a residency on BBC 6music every Sunday 4-6pm.

Jean-Dominique Lauwereins is the founder of BeTomorrow and Dronisos. He will present his latests developments related to autonomous drone swarms for shows but also for smart inspection.

Jean-Yves Le Gall is President of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the French space agency, since 2013. In this capacity, he is Interministerial Coordinator for satellite navigation programmes and Chair of the Administrative Board of GSA, the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Space Agency. He is also Chair of the Council of the European Space Agency (ESA) and President of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF).

© Paul Crowther

Ken Loach is a British film director well known and loved by French and British audiences alike. Since 1964, he has made six documentaries and around thirty films for English television, and twenty-six films for cinema. The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) and I, Daniel Blake (2016) won the Palme d’Or, the top Cannes award, at the Cannes Film Festival, where his work has received a total of 13 nominations and 7 awards.

Rob is AI Programme Leader at PwC where he works with partners across academia, government, technology vendors, start-ups, and other key stakeholders, in order to drive innovation within the Firm and develop new services for clients. He is an advisory board member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI, an adviser to The IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in AI and Autonomous Systems, and a TEDx speaker. He is an evangelist for responsible technology and promotes awareness of the growing ethical agenda relating to AI.

Rosa Mucignat is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. She is the author of Realism and Space in the Novel, 1795-1869 (2013), and has published articles on space and place in European and world literature from the eighteenth century to the present. Together with Sanja Perovic, she has worked on representations of the French Revolution in European literature. They are now starting a new project on the translation of radical texts between France and Italy in the revolutionary period. She has also written on Pier Paolo Pasolini and Friuli, and edited the collection of essay Friulian Language: Identity, Migration, Culture (2014).

After graduating from the Ponts et Chaussées engineering school, and being a Lecturer in artificial intelligence at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, François Pachet joined the SONY Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, where he became Director in 2014. With the ERC project Flow-Machines, he has created, with his team, a song in the Beatles-style (Daddy’s car), and after this, the first multi-artist album composed by an AI (Hello World) in 2018. He is now Director of the Spotify Creator Technology Research Lab in Paris.

© NASA Robert Markowitz

Tim Peake is a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut of British nationality. He finished his 186-day Principia mission working on the International Space Station for Expedition 46/47 when he landed back on Earth 18 June 2016. He conducted numerous experiments in space and is the first official British astronaut to have completed a spacewalk. Tim has a background as a test pilot and a British Army Air Corps officer. He is a Prince’s Trust ambassador.

Dr Sanja Perovic is a Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s College London. She specializes in 18th-century French literature and history, with broader interests in the politics and representation of time. Her recent book is entitled The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture and Politics. She has also published on 17th and 18th-century French theatre, encyclopaedias, censorship, exemplary history and various aspects of the French Revolution.

© NASA Bill Stafford

Thomas Pesquet is an ESA astronaut of French nationality. He has worked as an aerospace and as an airline pilot. In 2009, he is the youngest of the six Europeans selected to form the new class of ESA astronauts. As a flight engineer, he spent 196 days on the International Space Station from November 2016 to June 2017 (Expedition 50/51), working on more than 200 scientific experiments in the Station’s cutting edge laboratories.

Catherine Petitgas is a collector, patron and art historian. She collects Modern and Contemporary art, mostly from Latin America and holds a Masters in the History of Modern Art from the Courtauld Institute, London. Catherine is a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery, and chairs the boards of Gasworks/Triangle Network and the Franco-British initiative Fluxus Art Projects. She has been a member of the Tate Latin American Acquisitions Committee since 2004 and is Chair of the Tate International Council. She sits on the Board of the Société des Amis du Centre Pompidou in Paris. She was Executive Editor of Contemporary Art Brazil (2012), Contemporary Art Mexico (2014) and Contemporary Art Colombia (2016), all published by Thames & Hudson and TransGlobe.

Created in 2016, the Collectif Pétrole is a collaboration of rising artists from Toulouse. It is composed of DJs, musicians, visual and video artists, graphic designers and photographers. Their music is a blending of house, disco and hip-hop. They currently have 7 music releases in digital and vinyl format. They will be performing for After Midnight and will be our musical accompaniment for the event.

© Hanna Starkey

Agnès Poirier is a Paris-born and London-educated journalist, writer, critic and political commentator. She is the author of four essays about the different ways in which France and Britain do things and view the world, a topic she discussess on the BBC, Sky News and CNN and writes about in, among others, the Guardian, the Observer, The Times, Marianne, Télérama and L’Espresso. She has also taught at Sciences-Po in Paris, and pre-selects British films for the Cannes Film Festival. Her forthcoming book, Left Bank, Arts, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950 (Bloomsbury) is released in the UK in March.

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Marc Raynaud is a passionate mathematician and a skilful developer. As a teenager, he had already constructed a personal telescope and several miniature radio sets for his friends. He has recently designed and implemented a unique fulling operating prototype of the Turing Machine based on the seminal model proposed by Alan Turing in the mid-1930s for a programmable computing system. The machine will be demonstrated and will execute algorithms in front of you.

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Mathieu Sapin was born in Dijon, France, in 1974. He studied in l’Ecole supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg before becoming a renowned illustrator for children’s magazines and publishers in France. He’s also the author of graphic novels for adults such as Supermurgeman or Gérard, cinq années dans les pattes de Depardieu. His recent works, Campagne Présidentielle and Le Château – Une année dans les coulisses de l’Élysée follow the presidential campaign and a year in the mandate of former French President François Hollande.

Dr Benedict Schofield’s research spans the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, and covers various fields such as literary texts and theatre practice. A central concern of all his work is the representation of the German nation, German identity, and a broader notion of “Germanness” in cultural texts – particularly within popular culture. He also serves on the Executive Committee of the Association for German Studies and on the Advisory Board of the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies.

Posy Simmonds is a British newspaper cartoonist and writer and illustrator of children’s books. Author of the series Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe for The Guardian, she has also been a contributor to The Times and The Spectator. In France, she was awarded the Prix de la Critique by the Association des Critiques et journalistes de Bande Dessinée in 2009, and president of the Grand Jury last year (2017) for the Angoulême International Comics Festival (Festival international de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême).

Rod Skipp works for Liverpool Philharmonic as Artistic Director of In Harmony Liverpool, where he teaches cello and bass and conducts the Everton Children’s Orchestra, Resonate Youth Philharmonics, Liverpool Philharmonic Youth Academy Orchestra and the University of Liverpool Symphony Orchestra. As a cellist, Rod freelances with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra as well as performing regularly with the Strelitzia and Strata String Quartets. Rod has performed on radio and television, including BBC Radio 3, Songs of Praise, Come Dine with Me and The X Factor, and he plays with Michael Head and the Red Elastic Band, whose recent album reached No. 1 in the Indie chart.

Geneviève Strosser studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris where she was unanimously awarded a First Prize. She is regularly invited as a viola soloist by orchestras including the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra in London and the Orchestre de Chambre d’Auvergne.
Her repertoire of solo pieces includes some of the greatest works for viola composed in the 20th Century, and she works closely with living composers Stefano Gervasoni, Hugues Dufourt (who both dedicated a viola concerto to her) and Georges Aperghis.

Patrick Tresset is an artist-researcher who develops artworks using robotics as a medium. He also uses robots and autonomous computational systems to investigate the drawing practice. His work has been exhibited in association with major museums such as The Pompidou Center (Paris), Museum of Israel, Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), BOZAR (Brussels), Prada Foundation (Milan). Tresset has a M.Sc and M.Phil in art and technology from Goldsmiths (London). In 2017 he was a world economic forum cultural leader at Davos.

Graham Turnock is Chief Executive of the UK Space Agency. He combines a background in particle physics with extensive experience at national and European level. He has worked in the European Commission among several other posts in the UK Civil Service with a strong European element. He holds a PhD in Particle Physics from Cambridge University for theoretical work on collision experiments at CERN. He also holds a diploma in public administration from the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA).

Anaïs Vaugelade was born in Paris in 1973. She lived in the South of France until she was 17, then came back to Paris to study photography at the school of decorative arts while making children’s books for the publishing house L’École des loisirs. Now she also publishes books from others (Still for L’École des loisirs).