Julie Kretzschmar, Who Will Shape the Mediterranean's Year in France

If you are traveling in France this year — and especially if you are coming with us to Provence or Burgundy — there is one name worth committing to memory before you go: Julie Kretzschmar. The Institut français has named her general curator of the Saison Méditerranée 2026, the national program that, from May 15 through October 31, turns roughly two hundred events across the country into a single sustained meditation on the cultures of the Mediterranean. It opened in Marseille in late May. It does not close until Halloween.

What makes Kretzschmar worth knowing is not the scale of the thing, impressive as it is, but the shape of her thinking. She has organized the entire season around five threads — speculative utopias, plural identities, contemporary spiritualities, the histories of migration, and the construction of narratives. These are not the usual tourist-board abstractions. They are the questions a serious curator asks, and they will pull in artists, writers, and thinkers from across the Mediterranean world over the course of the summer and into autumn.

"The best reason to learn a curator's name is that it tells you, months in advance, where the interesting people will be standing."

For our purposes, this is practical intelligence as much as cultural news. Kretzschmar is deeply embedded in the French cultural-diplomatic world, and the season she has built will surface events in places we already pass through. The full program is published and publicly labeled, which means it can be read like a map. We will be scanning it for anything landing in Avignon, Montpellier, or the Burgundy region that might fold neatly into a journey — an exhibition, a conversation, an evening worth rerouting an afternoon for. If something extraordinary turns up near one of our dates, you will hear about it from us first.

For now, the recommendation is simple: know the name, and keep an eye on what she programs. Browse the full Saison Méditerranée 2026 program →