Poppy de Villeneuve

Poppy de Villeneuve is a film director and photographer whose subject matter includes rodeos, music festivals, airports, celebrities, and the great American West. Her surreal images, muted in tone and strikingly candid, capture people and places when they have their guards down—couples kissing with abandon, models deep in thought before posing for a shot, the desert at daybreak, before it wakes up for the morning.

In the past few years, her work has increasingly appeared both in exhibitions and in the media. She not only shoots regularly for publications such as The Telegraph and Vogue, she also recently directed five short films for The New York Times set in Central Park that star Macaulay Culkin, Quorianka Kilcer, Mary Beth Peil, and Edoardo Ballerini. Her clients include Anthropologie, Burberry, Art Review, Nylon, Jimmy Choo, Monocle, and Philips du Pury.

In 2010, several of her works were exhibited at Colette in Paris, and her short film for Nowness.com (a website for LVMH) was shown at the Pompidou Centre in Paris earlier this year, winning the Shu Uemura Beauty Prize.

Interview with the Artist

1. What is your idea of a dream holiday?
The warm countryside in Sicily with the people I love, cooking meals, eating outside, drinking wine, reading books and swimming.
2. If not yourself, who would you want to be?
A neuroscientist or a doctor. I'd need a completely different set of DNA to do that work!
3. What is your guilty pleasure?
Working in my pajamas.
4. What books are on your bedside table?
In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger (my constant companion), The Art of Living by Epictetus, Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy.
5. Who was your first love?
I don't define love in such a finite way: it's always unfolding and I don't believe has a start or end.