Julie Gautier

Why organisations work with Julie Gautier

• A first-hand discipline of working under physiological pressure that few keynote speakers can credibly claim. Two French records in constant weight freediving, minus 68 metres on a single breath, are evidence of a practice, not an anecdote.
• A creative body of work that translates the discipline into something an audience can feel. Ama, shot in a single breath in the world’s deepest pool, has reached a wide international audience and has become a reference point for how breath, focus and stillness are cultivated.
• Direct relevance to leadership audiences asking how to stay composed under public scrutiny, scrutiny markets, board pressure or crisis. The mechanism she describes is concrete: how the breath is trained, how attention is held, how panic is metabolised before it becomes decision.
• A second register of value for organisations working on creativity, environmental purpose, or the relationship between people and the natural world. Her films sit inside that conversation rather than next to it.

Biography highlights

• Two French records in constant weight freediving, minus 65 metres (2006) and minus 68 metres (2007).
• Co-founder of Les Films Engloutis, the production label behind her underwater work.
• Writer and director of Ama, performed in a single breath in the Y-40 deep pool, Italy.
• Co-director and writer of the underwater music video for Beyoncé and Naughty Boy’s “Runnin’ (Lose It All)” (2015).
• Director of One Breath Around the World, featured in National Geographic’s Short Film Showcase.
• TEDxLausanneWomen speaker, December 2019, “Inspiration in the Absence of Breath”.

Biography

Holding the breath is a trained skill, not a held-back reflex. Gautier worked on it for nine years as a competitive freediver, including two French national records in constant weight, before stepping out of the sport in 2009. The discipline she learned, working with the breath rather than against it, is the substance she now brings to leadership audiences.

Her second career has been as a director and performer in underwater cinema. With Guillaume Néry, she co-founded Les Films Engloutis, the label behind films including Narcose, Ocean Gravity and One Breath Around the World, the last of which was carried by National Geographic’s Short Film Showcase. She also co-directed and wrote the underwater music video for Beyoncé and Naughty Boy’s “Runnin’ (Lose It All)”.

Ama, released on International Women’s Day in 2018, is the work that brought the practice into the cultural conversation. It is a single-breath performance in the Y-40 deep pool in Italy, choreographed and performed by Gautier herself. It has been read as a piece on grief, on women’s resilience, on the management of pressure, on the value of stillness. It is not a metaphor for any of those things. It is the discipline made visible.

For a corporate audience, the relevance is direct. Senior leaders are working in conditions where composure has become a performance variable. Gautier’s contribution is not motivational language. It is a description of how a person who has practised breath and attention under real physiological constraint actually does it, and what transfers when the audience walks out of the room.

Key speaking topics

• Breath, focus and composure under pressure
• Self-leadership and emotional regulation
• Creativity drawn from natural environments
• Personal discipline and long-form practice
• Ocean storytelling and environmental purpose

Ideal for

• Senior leadership offsites where composure under public pressure is a stated theme
• Cultural and inspirational segments of conferences for boards, executive committees and partner audiences
• Wellbeing, performance and people-function summits looking for substantive content on breath and attention
• Brand, creative and sustainability events where ocean storytelling has natural anchor

Audience outcomes

• A concrete account of how breath is trained as a tool for focus, not as a wellness motif
• A vocabulary for talking about composure as a learned practice rather than a personal trait
• Visual material, drawn from her films, that audiences continue to discuss after the session
• A working frame for how stillness, patience and humility translate into professional performance