Marc Brétillot is a Food Designer. He participates in catering and artisan culinary practices, the creation of new products, innovation consulting for the food industry and organizes international events and performances for galleries and museums. He is the director of the Masters Program and also created the Post-graduate degree of Culinary Design at the Art & Design University of Reims (ESAD), which is where his adventure began when he created the first Research Workshop on culinary design in 1999. He gives conferences at the prestigious cooking school, Ecole superieure de cuisine française Ferrandi in Paris and is also invited to give workshops in France and abroad. He is co author of Culinaire Design published by Alternatives and is currently developing an online platform called www.thinkingfooddesign.com which brings together industrialists, chefs, designers, historians – and anyone else – who is passionate about food.

Marc Brétillot

Caroline Champion is a researcher in literature and aesthetic philosophy, specializing in the field of taste. She is the author of Appetizers, Essay on the relationship between arts and kitchen, published by Fretin Menu (2010) and numerous publications on the question of taste, its language, representations and its challenges; The Journal of Gastronomy, Mode Search and Right of Cities, just to name a few. She has been with Convergences Culinaires since 2008. From 2007 to 2008, she was the Product Manager of Research & Development at Fauchon. She also held cooking classes for the Atelier des Chefs from  2008-2009.

Her experimental art projects include Performance according to protocol “ExpérimenTable” (Louvre, Slick Art Fair, Galerie Polaris, Tuilleries, Metropolitan Fine Arts in Paris, Théâtre de Gennevilliers) since 2009 and Installing scalable “digest palimpsest,” Elaine Levy Gallery
Project, Brussels (Jan 2010).

She holds a Master of Modern Literature (Sorbonne, with honors) and a Master of International Management and Project Engineers (Dauphine, with honors).

Convergence Culinaires

Exploratrice de Saveurs

Two years ago, when still in his late 20s, Alexandre Gauthier restored the Michelin star to his family’s restaurant in northern France and has gone on to considerable acclaim. Trained locally and then at Alain Ducasse at Plaza Athénée in Paris and at La Pinède in Saint Tropez, Mr. Gauthier loves to bemuse diners with his ingredient combinations, such as quail eggs on crushed Brussels sprouts, with grated garlic and diced grapes. He aims at revealing new tastes and things that would normally go un-noticed in those ingredients. His cooking is precise, delicate, elegant yet provocative, wild and robust.

La Grenouillère

Alok b. Nandi, born in Congo and raised in Zaïre, is based in Brussels, where he has studied engineering, management and film (Licence en Philosophie et Lettres). As a designer, media artist and writer-director, he explores conflicting constraints in evolving and hybrid contexts, via his design label Architempo, with a focus on interaction design, exhibition design and food design.

From hi-tech interactive installations (Extrafiction framework) to lo-tech mise-en-scene (i.e. Cannes Film Festival and Jules Verne exhibition design) and publishing (Casterman Tintin, Flammarion, Glénat), he is dealing with storytelling in multiple media, place and technologies. Japan Foundation Fellow. He is also a regular speaker in international conferences in Asia, Europe, US. Invited professor/lecturer. He has launched Pecha Kucha Brussels, Ignite and is local leader of IxDA (interaction design). From co-design to co-creation, from immersive installations to food systems, from connected story spaces and films to radio chronicles, he is busy with a large palette of narrative modalities. In 2011-12, he has launched coCreationcamp and coCreation cuisine.

Alok Nandi