French actress, screenwriter, and director Anaïs Tellenne was born on May 17, 1987, in Paris. After earning a literary baccalaureate, she joined Les Ateliers du Sudden for professional acting training with a focus on directing. She then studied at the International Center for Dance, specializing in directing and ballet libretto writing, alongside professional classical dance training.

In 2017, she directed her first short film, 19 Juin, for France 2, and later co-directed Le Mal bleu with Zoran Boukherma. In 2020, she co-wrote the feature L’Engloutie with Louise Hémon, which won the Beaumarchais Writing Grant and the Screenplay Award.

After completing her latest short film, Modern Jazz, she joined the Annual Selection of Groupe Ouest, where she developed the screenplay for L’Homme d’argile, her first feature film. A year and a half later, she shot the film in Burgundy, working with Raphaël Thiéry and Emmanuelle Devos in a Morvan manor. This continued her fruitful artistic collaboration with Thiéry, who had starred in her previous three short films. The movie was nominated at the 80th Venice Film Festival in 2023.

Initially set on becoming an actress, Anaïs Tellenne’s life took a turn after a scooter accident on set. During her recovery, she had to relearn how to walk and began a career shift by writing her first short film. Since then, her filmmaking has been marked by care and sensitivity, particularly in her work with Raphaël Thiéry, with whom she hopes to collaborate long-term on feature films. 

In L’Homme d’argile, she offers him a nuanced role: a man whose life transforms when others begin to see him differently. Tellenne is committed to crafting cinema that is both rigorous and accessible, focusing on the empirical and the physical. The film weaves a narrative of contrasts and harmonies, particularly between the characters of Raphaël and the ambivalent Garance. She aims to create a work that serves as a coming-of-age tale, venturing into both burlesque comedy and drama. 

Anaïs Tellenne’s L’Homme d’argile was featured at the 2023 Venice Biennale in the “Orizzonti Extra” section. The film won the Audience Award at the Busan International Film Festival 2023 and received a Special Jury Mention and the Young Jury Prize at the Saint-Jean-de-Luz International Film Festival. 

The Institut français acquired the rights to her debut feature, which will be available from January on IFCinéma—a platform providing a catalog of films for public, non-commercial screenings by the French cultural network abroad. 

Tellenne is now working on Les Indépendants, a biopic about Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, which she is directing in the United States.