Mounir Bondurand Mouawad was born in Beirut, Lebanon. His family moved to France when he was ten years old and settled in Marseilles, on the Mediterranean coast. He completed the French equivalent of a B.A. in Islamic Studies and Political Sciences from the prestigious INALCO in Paris.  While he was studying towards his M.A. in Islamic Studies, he was granted a scholarship to write his thesis in Damascus, Syria. There he started to teach French and Arabic for the first time. Thrilled by this experience, Mounir taught French & Arabic languages and cultures in Spain, Syria, Lebanon, the UK and the US several years in a row. 

A desperate movie buff, and deeply convinced by the cultural importance of visual representations, he joined the MA program in Film Studies at UC Berkeley and completed his PhD a few years later at the university Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle. 

In 2010, Mounir entered the Illinois Program in Paris as faculty. A few years later, he became the adjunct director of the program and has been serving as Resident Director since 2016. He is also a lecturer at Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle and an affiliate researcher at the IRCAV (Institut de Recherches sur l’Audiovisuel – EA 185). His current research and latest articles are dedicated to the visual representations of nature and non-humans. 

Laetitia Boisdron was born in Holland, spent her childhood in Brazil and completed high school in the United States (Princeton and Washington DC). She arrived in France when she was 17 years old and after majoring in French literature during her first years of university, she graduated from the Sorbonne with a D.E.A. in the didactics of langage and culture. For more than twenty years, she has been teaching French, literature, and methodology for foreign students at Sciences-po, ESCP, ESCE and American University programs in Paris (CUPA, NorthWestern U, St Johns U, Delaware U). For three years, she was the coordinator for cultural activities for the NUSP program (NorthWestern University and Sciences-po). She is also instructor for French teachers for short summer sessions, in France, Finland and Azerbaidjan. She is currently the adjunct director for Illinois Program in Paris, specifically in charge of student life and the supervision of independent studies and the course Engagement in Paris.