Our Contributors: Bruno Decharme began working in film industry after having finished his MA degree in philosophy in 1973, first as an assitant of the French filmmaker Jacques Tati, later as an editor, screenplay writer, producer, then as a director of short features, documentary films and advertising films. In 1980, he founded the Théâtre de l’Escalier d’Or. He also directed several music clips, one of which won the highest French music award in 2005, Victoire de la Musique. Since 1998, he created a series of documentary films about art brut and its creators. His films recieved several awards on various film festivals. In 1981, he started collecting art brut.
Barbara Šafářová lives in France. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in 2005, her thesis was entitled Achilles G. Rizzoli and Art Brut: An Interdisplinary Approach. She finished a second thesis, Unica Zürn, in 2006. She has written a number of articles on art brut (with Terezie Zemánková, Notes on Art Brut in the Czech Republic, in the catalogue L’art brut tchèque, Halle Saint-Pierre 2002, Hundred Years of Collections, a Century of Collectors, in the catalogue à corps perdu, abcd une collection d’art brut, ParisMusées 2004). President of abcd since 2002. Apart from her passion for art brut she loves foreign languages (she speaks about ten of them). She has also worked as a TV producer and teaches belly dance.
Terezie Zemánková received her Ph.D. at the Charles University Prague and the Sorbonne in Paris. The topic of her dissertation was art brut - the primordial creation. She wrote a number of articles about art brut for Folk Art Magazine, Création franche, Raw Vision, Art & Antiques, Xantypa, and Právo. Together with Barbara Šafářová she wrote Notes on Art Brut in the Czech Republic in the catalogue l’art brut tchèque, Halle Saint-Pierre 2002, and Zdenek Košek, the Master of Time in the catalogue Créateurs du ciel et de la terre, abcd la galerie, Paris. She is the curator of the exhibition System in Chaos - Contemporary Czech Art Brut (Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York, USA, 2005) and Magical Visions of Eva Droppová and Anna Zemánková (Gallery X and the Czech Center in Bratislava, Slovakia, 2006).