photo: Michel Perez

Jeanne Belanger de Sainte Marie is a Franco-American artist and author-illustrator based in France, dividing her time between Paris and Provence.  She loves to depict the magic of real-life or imaginary places, the changing seasons, and the world of childhood. Nature provides her with colors and patterns. Gardens, parks, and city trees - witnesses to a harmony between Humanity and Nature are some of her preferred subjects. Watercolor and Procreate for iPad are her favorite means of expression.

Jeanne was born in the United States, hailing from Michigan in the Great Lakes Region. She has a Fine Art degree (BFA) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and complemented her studies at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. After a career in automotive color and materials design in the U.S. and in Europe, she settled in France, the land of her French-Canadian ancestors, where she now devotes herself to drawing and painting.

School Library Journal selected A Word’s A Bird, the app which she illustrated with hundreds of watercolor paintings and animation drawings, for their Best Of 2013 list and highlighted its “Caldecott Award-quality”.

Her work is exhibited and published on both sides of the Atlantic and figures in the collections of the Bibliothèque Forney in Paris (Art and Graphic Design Library) and the Mazza Museum, University of Findlay, Ohio.

For illustration work, contact her agent:  Erzsi Deak at Hen & Ink Literary

photo: George Greenlee