The Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation is engaged in the fields of culture, diversity and education

For the 30th consecutive year, the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation, under the aegis of the Fondation de France, awarded 11 grants in 2019 to young creatives from the worlds of writing, digital technology, broadcast and music.
The 13 grant winners for this anniversary year join the 307 talented young people who have already received grants from the Foundation. Over the last 30 years, a number of innovative projects have come to light thanks to the determination and daring of the grant winners. Many of them enjoyed remarkable success in 2019, such as Éric Baudelaire (Photographer winner 2003), who won the Prix Marcel Duchamp, the most prestigious contemporary art award in France, and Christophe Barral (Film producer winner 2011), producer of the film Les Misérables, which attracted around 2 million viewers in France in 2019 and represented France at the Oscars.
The Foundation continues to assert its deep-seated commitment to promoting cultural diversity by supporting institutions like the Institut du monde arabe, with which it awards the Arab literature prize each year, or the Orchestre Symphonique Divertimento, which for 20 years has allowed all audiences to access orchestral music.
Because supporting creativity and education is still central to what it does, the Foundation is a loyal partner of the Académie de France in Rome - Villa Médicis and its programme of short residences for grant winners from higher education institutions specialising in the creation, theory and history of the arts, as well as the Centre Pompidou and its space reserved exclusively for teenagers, Studio 13/16. Since it opened 10 years ago, the space has already received around 80,000 young people and exhibited works by more than 100 artists and collectives.
In 2019, the Foundation also supported the Abbaye aux Dames Place aux jeunes! scheme, the cité musicale music centre in Saintes (France), which helps children to fulfil their musical potential and acquire cultural reference points.


Pierre Leroy with 2019 grant recipients, January 2020 (Paris, France).

Key figure

320 talented young people have received grants from the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation since 1990.