For over 35 years, Nelly Saunier has dedicated her artistic talent to featherwork. She was fourteen when she discovered feathers and their infinite possibilities. Having found her calling, she learned featherwork techniques at Lycée Octave Feuillet, then completed her training with textile design studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’Art Olivier de Serres.

At the beginning of her career, Nelly Saunier collaborated with many famous haute couture houses such as Chanel, Givenchy, Nina Ricci, Isabelle Marant, Louboutin, and Jean-Paul Gaultier – 17 years of collaboration – creating unique and spectacular pieces for them. She has also worked with renowned designers, created costumes for cinema, and more recently, exceptional and infinitely delicate pieces for high jewelry and watchmaking houses – Harry Winston, Van Cleef & Arpels, Chopard, Hennessy, Hermès, and Piaget.

In her Parisian workshop, she never stops experimenting, virtuously transcending ancestral savoir-faire to obtain unexpected plastic effects. Nelly Saunier enjoys transforming nature endlessly, as shown by her Nature Transformée® series, feather flower illusions. Her works play with texture and the infinite richness of feathers, through trompe-l’œil, shams, or metamorphoses.

Her feather sculptures are exhibited in museums and contemporary art venues in France and abroad (such as the MAD, Palais de Tokyo, Musée du Quai Branly, Philharmonie de Paris, Musée de la Chasse and de la Nature, National Museum of Tokyo in Japan, National Museum of China in Beijing).

Appointed Maître d'Art in 2008, winner of the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for the Intelligence of the Hand in 2009, and beneficiary of the Villa Kujoyama program in 2015, she was made Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2020 and named to the National Order of Merit by the Grand Chancellery of the Legion of Honor in 2025.

In a perpetual quest for the exceptional and the unexpected, Nelly Saunier's approach is to innovate in the art of featherwork, transcending universes to create colorful works in the service of illusion. To surprise is a singular expression, her signature. Whether through poetic trompe-l’œil or within a collaboration, Nelly Saunier magnifies the material to enchant the world.