French, b. 1980 Catherine Meurisse was born in 1980 in Niort in the West of France. At seventeen, she won the school comic book competition at the Angoulême International Festival. After studying at the School of Decorative Arts in Paris, she embarked on illustration, comics, and press cartoons, a field in which she gained popularity through regular collaboration with Charlie Hebdo. After escaping the January 2015 attack, she turned her back on caricature to devote herself mainly to comics. Through her graphic novel Lightness (2016), Catherine Meurisse recounts her journey from loss and heartbreak to her eventual recovery and reentry into the world of illustrations. She also pays homage to the splendor of nature and the fine arts, something that is carried through her next three graphic novels, Great Spaces (2018), Delacroix (2019) and Young Woman and the Sea (2021). In the United States, she illustrated Lenny The Lobster Can’t Stay For Dinner by Finn and Michael Buckley. In 2020, she became the first comic strip artist to become a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts and she was one of the three artists nominated for the prestigious Grand Prix d’ Angoulême 2021.