Yael Naim

Yael Naim, a French-Israeli singer-songwriter and director, has become an essential artist on both the French and international music scenes. Yael Naim has always made her life her art, and vice versa: innovating, exploring, and sharing. Creating her own reality by taking risks. Since the groundbreaking success of her song “New Soul”—which reached number one on the singles charts in France, the United States, and several other countries, and entered the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100—Yael Naim has been composing and producing not only for herself, with four albums to date, but also for a range of other artists and film soundtracks. She has been awarded three Victoires de la Musique (2008, 2011, and 2016) and was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters. Yael has collaborated with numerous artists including Brad Mehldau, the Metropole Orkest, Jules Buckley, Stromae, Rone, Orlan, and many others—cultivating both personal expression and creative dialogue. In 2021, she chose independence to push even further in her pursuit of a unique sound and full artistic freedom. She directed and produced an ambitious album that fuses classical music, electronic textures, and orchestration, carried by provocative, personal, and committed lyrics dealing with themes of individual freedom and breaking free from limiting beliefs. In parallel, Yael Naim is at the heart of a documentary co-written with director Jill Coulon: “Yael Naim. Une nouvelle âme” (“A New Soul”). The result of six years of filming, this intimate and sensitive film delves deeply into Yael’s artistic journey, unfolding through a constant dialogue between her inner life and creative process. It features never-before-seen archival footage from her childhood, rare moments captured over the years, and animated sequences created by Yael herself, bringing a poetic and introspective dimension to the narrative. Told in the first person, the film sincerely explores what it means to be a woman, an independent artist, and a mother—a delicate balance in constant reinvention. More than just a portrait, it is a universal quest: the journey of building oneself freely, against the grain of norms and expectations. Over the past four years, her writing has also taken shape in a book where Yael Naim reveals herself as never before. At the heart of this autobiography, Une chambre à moi (A Room of My Own, published by Éditions Leduc), she revisits—with great honesty—her path and all the transformations she has undergone as a woman, artist, and activist. Since her childhood, image has always played a decisive role in Yael's daily life. From the age of three, she developed her creative sensitivity, both in singing and playing the piano, as well as in drawing. Over time, each medium developed at its own pace. Records, concerts, musical direction, photography, painting, animation... Then came the desire to master the image—her own as well as others’. Yael Naim seeks and innovates with the sole desire that everything can resonate together, in order to better assert herself and better reflect the issues of her time. In recent years, Yael has developed her visual language by painting a series of portraits of women to give voice to their stories, as well as self-portraits. Having directed her own music videos since "Shine" (2020) and signed the short film “Unreleased Nightsongs” released on Nowness in collaboration with the Fondation Louis Vuitton during the exhibition dedicated to Cindy Sherman, she uses visual art to extend the invisible world of music. Recently, she decided to reveal her large collection of figurative paintings of imaginary women titled Well Behaved Woman, as well as an impressive series of photographs portraying the women who surround and inspire her. Meanwhile, through the self-portrait format, she continues to explore her own presence in the world. For Yael, engagement is not just a word. As an Officer of the Arts and Letters and one of the 100 Women of Culture for