Born in Charleville-Mézières in 1976, Gisèle Vienne studied philosophy and music before enrolling at the National School of Puppetry in her city. There she met the choreographer Étienne Bideau-Rey, with whom she created her first shows (Splendid's, 2000, Showroomdummies, 2001).

Since 2004, the artist has been working on personal projects around violence and its relationship to enjoyment and the sacred: The Pyre, a show about "sacred horror" expressed by the dancer's body, at once fantastical and faith; Kindertotenlieder, which questions the representation of fear and death.

Alongside her work as a director, Gisèle Vienne also works on photographic and fine art projects.

Since her earliest work, Gisèle Vienne has constantly analysed human nature at its darkest and most disturbing. The characters that populate her world create an ambiguous feeling, somewhere between fascination and rejection. Thus Crowd (2017), a rave for 15 dancers, incorporates ritual elements into its structure, and investigates the mechanisms of group violence between jubilation and release.

Jerk (2008) addresses the subject of violence through the tale a serial killer’s crimes. A straightforward combination of sex and violence, this creation is original for its use of the hand-puppet “gore” tradition, from which the artist draws inspiration.

Since her first shows, Gisèle Vienne has attracted international visibility. Showroomdummies (2001, 2009 and 2013), which explores the boundaries between the animate and inanimate by bringing dancers and inert mannequins together, has been performed in Europe (Spain, Portugal and Austria, in particular) and Japan.

The installation Last Spring: A (2011) was presented at the Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as well as at the Pompidou Centre in Paris as part of her solo exhibition “Teenage Hallucination” in 2012.

Gisèle Vienne’s greatest success remains The Ventriloquists Convention (2015). Inspired by a meeting of ventriloquists held each year in Kentucky, in the United States, the show discusses the motivations that push ventriloquists to practise their art and the way it is perceived. The play has been performed in the United States and Japan, as well as in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, Romania, Portugal and Estonia.