teachers

Born in 1971 in Nice. Lives and works in Paris.

Joann Sfar was born in Nice in 1971 and grew up in an environment that was at once Jewish, Ashkenazi and Sephardic. He learned Hebrew and the precepts of the Torah but attended state school. He began inventing and drawing stories very early on with the abundance that still characterizes him today. Every month from the age of fifteen he sent a comic book project to publishers, all of whom turned him down with the same regularity. After a master's degree in philosophy at the University of Nice, he entered Beaux-Arts de Paris and became passionate about morphology lessons. In 1993, he stepped over the threshold of the Atelier Nawak, later Atelier des Vosges, where he met Lewis Trondheim, David B., Jean-Christophe Menu, Emmanuel Guibert, Christophe Blain, Emile Bravo and Marjane Satrapi. Since then Joann Sfar has composed an absolutely original oeuvre. His stories are at once profound, humorous and sensual. His characters have an Albert Cohen earthiness to them and his obvious pleasure in drawing can be likened to that of Quentin Blake. He is one of that group of comic creators who have instilled a new life in the form. While he defines himself as a compulsive sketcher who never goes through the day without taking his pencil out, this adept of the living stroke dashed down on paper is also very much a writer. This storyteller gives as much importance to words as images and is as comfortable with his computer screen or behind a camera as he is with his panels.