The artist

Cocovan is a 37-year-old French-Iranian performance artist and former pop musician. She was born and raised in Paris, France, where she began her artistic journey as a pop singer at 16, and eventually relocated to the USA in 2010 to pursue her music dreams. After a 10-year career in music — releasing multiple EPs, touring internationally, and working with some of pop music’s biggest names — she decided to start exploring beyond sound, and through a different art form: performance art.

In 2016, she began her “Poetic Interventions” – a series of public art performances. Set up directly in the street, the eight-hour ephemeral pieces, always poetic and dreamy, were meant to enchant the urban environment and disrupt the daily routine with unexpected beauty. Meeting instant success, Cocovan decided to put her music career on hold to focus solely on performance art, committing to take these installations all around the world. Whether sitting on the moon on Paris’s infamous Pont des Arts, covering Venice Beach in petals, or lying down on a bed in the streets of London, she would like to remind everyone that poetry can be found anywhere, especially where you least expect it.

One of these public performances organically evolved into the ongoing participatory art project, “The World Letter.”

Her work has been performed and/or exhibited at Art Basel Miami (2017), the Cannes Film Festival (2018), Refinery29’s “29Rooms” (NYC and LA editions) (2018),

Her music works have been featured in Billboard, Noisey, Perez Hilton, DAZED, PAPER Magazine

Her art works have been published in LA Weekly, Konbini, Refinery 29, France Info, Artnet

She has given a TEDx Talk at Columbia University, spoken at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, and participated in The JED Foundation’s story-sharing program (New York City).

She is based in Paris, France.

Public speaking

Cocovan is a TEDx speaker, and has given public talks at the UN Headquarters in NYC, the JED Foundation in NYC, and lectures in schools and universities around the world including Columbia University in NYC, Sciences Po Paris, the University of Lviv in Ukraine, and the University of Liège in Belgium. She tells the extraordinary journey of how she went from pop singer to traveling the world with a giant love letter... And the many discoveries she made about humanity along the way!

What can we learn about the world from 25,000 love letters from humanity?