Romain Blanc-Tailleur is an animation filmmaker, animation cinema lecturer at ENSAD, and musician.

A SACRe doctoral candidate since 2025 within EnsadLab, his research focuses on the study of animation cinema and animated signs as tools for musical and stage composition and interaction.

His animation work is characterized by a direct and lively approach, combining original writing, exploration of gesture and materiality, and the hybridization of traditional and digital techniques.

He has worked as both writer and director on short films (Glong, Mars…), and animated series such as Zooz, a science-fiction children’s series centered around biology; L’amour à ses réseaux, a two-season series about relationships in the digital age co-directed with Cécile Rousset for Arte; La Lune et nous; and Culture Physique, among others. Alongside these projects, he has created numerous animated sequences for documentary films, immersive installations, and exhibition films for prestigious institutions including the BnF, the Cité des Sciences, the Comics Museum of Angoulême, and the Troyes Museum.

He also regularly collaborates as a co-author, animation director for stage productions, or composer with various performing arts companies, including Boustrophedon, Acétes, La Ménagerie, and Komplexkapharnaum. He is also the creator of audio podcasts, including Le jardin du dedans.

As a composer and musician, he combines instrumental sounds with electronic and electroacoustic production. A multi-instrumentalist, he performs both solo and with external ensembles. He has composed original music for animated series and short films, installations, and live performances, and has been represented since 2020 by the publisher Cristal Publishing.

Since 2018, he has been developing a practice of improvisation directed through animation cinema, in the form of performances (Bains Numériques, Across Festival…) and workshops in conservatories. This practice forms the starting point of his research-creation work within the Réflexive Interactions group.

At the Lyon School of Fine Arts, Olivier developed a hybrid practice combining the construction of performative machines, programming, and electronic tinkering. After contributing to the creation of the Labo-NRV, he founded the Laboratoire d’Artisanat Numériques aka lan (Digital Craft Laboratory)  at the école des Arts Décoratifs Paris-PSL in 2019 and coordinates the digital cultures and practices meridian. His personal practice continues to evolve, and he primarily works in collaboration with other artists on the production of tools and machines.

Maude Guirault is designer, student-researcher and artist at the Ateliers Vauban – the artists’ studios of Besançon. Having graduated with a DNSEP from ESAD Le Mans in 2021, followed by a Master’s degree from the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2023, her practise is at the cross of computational, textile and material design. Poetic and transdisciplinary, this practise combines traditional craftsmanship, robotics and scientific protocols. As designer and young researcher, she explores existing or potential areas of permeability between these fields by combining the aesthetic, mechanical and symbolic properties of materials and shapes.

Maude taught for several years at the ESAD in Le Mans, before spending nearly two years as engineer and manager of a technologic platform specialised in robotics at the Femto-ST research Institute.

She has been invited to present her work in several artistic and/or research contexts: En Souplesse seminar (Paris, 2025), Centre Culturel Canadien (Paris, 2025), Journée de l’IA dans les métiers d’art et du design (Besançon, 2025), Ateliers Vauban’s galery (Besançon, 2025), Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital (Paris, 2025), 10th Technology School of the CNRS Mechanics Network (Port-Barcarès, 2025), Jeudis de la Recherche webinar (2025), Summer School – soft robotics (Lille, 2024), Designers’ Days (Paris, 2024), International Day of the artistic practise of embroidery craft (Malicorne-sur-Sarthe, 2024), Hangar Y (Meudon-la-Forêt, 2023), Journées européennes du patrimoine (Paris, 2023), Paris Design Week (Paris, 2023), London Design Biennale (Londres, 2023). Furthermore, Maude has collaborated on the design and creation of artworks by other artists, such as Intimations of Shanshui, a Vivian Wang artpiece commissioned and subsequently exhibited by the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, and RÉESPIRATION, an artistic installation by Samuel Bianchini, commissioned by researchers at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, coordination: Société des Nouveaux Commanditaires, with mediation by the 3CA association.

Since February 2026, she has been pursuing a practice-based CIFRE PhD in design, in collaboration with EnsadLab, the Laboratory of Physics and Mechanics of Heterogeneous Media at ESPCI, and the Atelier Montex. She is affiliated with the Reflective Interaction and Soft Matters groups at EnsadLab, as well as the Mécawet team at the PMMH. This practice-based phD project aims, first and foremost, to design and test custom-made embroidered clothing for deformable objects within the field known internationally as ‘soft robotics’.

Graduated of a master’s degree in object and space design in 2020 at the ESAD of Reims, Corentin was first interested in the user affection towards objects, and more precisely how intelligent objects can stimulate particular emotional reactions to the user.

In 2021, he joined the PhD training year of EnsadLab within the Reflective Interaction research group. He gradually focused his interest on the notion of Curiosity as a metaphor for the data collect process realised by intelligent assistants. Starting from the observation that this hidden and sometimes intrusive process leads to an ambient distrust of these devices, he proposes to question about the way of which an object design and an object behavior design could reveals this process to clarify the relationship between these virtual assistants and the user.

Next to his PhD training, Corentin co-founded the Bureau Commun design studio, where he and others designers are interested in the impact of digital technology on society.

Anna Schaeffner, is an interaction designer and researcher. After studying product design in France she graduated with a Bachelor’s degree (2018) and a Master’s degree (2021) in interaction design, at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee in Berlin where she lives since 2015. Her various professional experiences abroad; in San Francisco or Copenhagen, helped her refine her design practice, around the development of new forms of hybrid interactions, which mix new technologies and societal and environmental concerns.Today she collaborates on many projects with a Berlin-based design studio, and in parallel Anna is enrolled in a pre-doctoral year at EnsadLab, in the reflective interaction group.Her research focuses on softrobotics, and the design of deformation, as a vector of motion, as a capacity for dynamic material adaptation and expressiveness. Through the practice of design, she explores the deformation to tend to other forms of interface between robotic objects and their environments. 

Website: anna-schaeffner.com