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Art & Public Policy

Biography

Annie Cohen-Solal is a Professor at the University of Caen (American Studies), a Visiting Arts Professor at New York University (Tisch School of the Arts), and she is in charge of a seminar the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (Sociology of American art). She was born in Algeria, received a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne and taught at the Freie Universität in Berlin, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the University of Paris XIII. After her Paul Nizan, communiste impossible, (Grasset, 1980), she published a biography of Sartre, Sartre 1905-1980 (Gallimard, 1985) which was translated into sixteen languages; the current American version, Sartre (The New Press, 2005) has been prefaced by Cornel West. On the occasion of Sartre's centennial, in 2005, Dr Cohen-Solal published: Sartre, un penseur pour le XXI° siècle (Gallimard, « Découvertes ») and Jean-Paul Sartre (PUF, « Que sais-je»), contributed articles in Dictionnaire Sartre (Champion, 2004), Sartre dans son siècle (BNF and Gallimard, 2005), lectured internationally. In Brazil, after meeting with Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil, she was asked to create a Sartre Chair at the University of Brasilia.   From 1989 to 1993, Dr Cohen-Solal served as the Cultural Counselor to the French Embassy in the United States. Following her experience as a cultural diplomat, she published 'Un jour ils auront des peintres', l'avènement des peintres américains : Paris 1867-New York 1948, Gallimard, 2000, which received the Prix Bernier of the Académie Française.  Painting American, the Rise of American Artists : Paris 1867-New-York 1948, Knopf, 2001, in the Netherlands and Italy. Subsequently, Dr. Cohen-Solal produced a radio series De Frederic Church à Jackson Pollock, la longue marche des peintres américains for France-Culture. In 2005-2006, as Fellow at the Pollock-Krasner Foundation at SUNY-Stony Brook, she has been conducting a research on the gallerist Leo Castelli, organizing a Symposium “From Abstract Expressionists to Magicians of the Earth, The New State of The Art World”. In 2007-2010, she will be organizing an Institute: An Observatory for the Global Visual Arts, in partnership between Tisch School of the Arts (NYU) and the EHESS-Paris.