Niki de Saint Phalle

Niki de Saint Phalle (born Catherine-Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle; 29 October 193021 May 2002) was a French-American sculptor, painter, and filmmaker. Widely noted as one of the few female monumental sculptors, Saint Phalle was also known for her social commitment and work.
She had a difficult and traumatic childhood and a much-disrupted education, which she wrote about many decades later. After an early marriage and two children, she began creating art in a naïve, experimental style. She first received worldwide attention for angry, violent assemblages which had been shot by firearms. These evolved into "Nanas", light-hearted, whimsical, colorful, large-scale sculptures of animals, monsters, and female figures. Her most comprehensive work was the "Tarot Garden", a large sculpture garden containing numerous works ranging up to house-sized creations. Her idiosyncratic style has been called "outsider art"; she had no formal training in art, but associated freely with many other contemporary artists, writers, and composers.
Throughout her creative career, she collaborated with other well-known artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, composer John Cage, and architect Mario Botta, as well as dozens of less-known artists and craftspersons. For several decades, she worked especially closely with Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, who also became her second husband. In her later years, she suffered from multiple chronic health problems attributed to repeated exposure to glass fibers and petrochemical fumes from the experimental materials she had used in her pioneering artworks, but she continued to create prolifically until the end of her life.
A critic has observed that Saint Phalle's "insistence on exuberance, emotion and sensuality, her pursuit of the figurative and her bold use of color have not endeared her to everyone in a minimalist age". She was well known in Europe, but her work was little-seen in the US, until her final years in San Diego. Another critic said: "The French-born, American-raised artist is one of the most significant female and feminist artists of the 20th century, and one of the few to receive recognition in the male-dominated art world during her lifetime".
Early life and education (1930–1948).
Marie-Agnès de Saint Phalle was born on October 29, 1930, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, near Paris. Her father was Count André-Marie Fal de Saint Phalle (1906–1967), a French banker, and her mother was an American, named Jeanne Jacqueline Harper (1908–1980). Marie-Agnès was the second of five children, and her double first cousin was French novelist Thérèse de Saint Phalle (Baroness Jehan de Drouas).
Her birth was one year after Black Tuesday, and the French economy was also suffering in the aftermath of the infamous stock market crash that initiated the Great Depression. Within months of her birth, her father's finance company closed, and her parents moved with her oldest brother to the suburbs of New York City; she was left with her maternal grandparents in Nièvre, near the geographical center of France. Around 1933, she rejoined her parents in Greenwich, Connecticut; her father had found work as manager of the American branch of the Saint Phalle family's bank. In 1937, the family moved to East 88th Street and Park Avenue in the affluent Upper East Side neighborhood of New York City. By this time, Marie-Agnès was known as "Niki", the name she would use from then on.
Niki grew up in a strict Catholic environment, against which she repeatedly rebelled. Her mother was temperamental and violent, beating the younger children, and forcing them to eat even if they were not hungry. Both of her younger siblings, Elizabeth and Richard de Saint Phalle, would later commit suicide as adults. The atmosphere at home was tense; the only place where Niki felt comfortable and warm was in the kitchen, overseen by a black cook. Decades later, Niki would reveal that she had suffered years of sexual abuse from her father, starting at the age of 11. She would later refer to the environment where she grew up as "hell" ("enfer").
She spent most of her childhood and adolescence in New York City, and summers in Connecticut or Long Island. She frequently returned to France to visit relatives, becoming fluent in both French and American English. In 1937, she attended school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on East 91st Street in Manhattan. After she was expelled in 1941, she rejoined her maternal grandparents, who had moved to Princeton, New Jersey, and she briefly attended the public school there.
She returned to the Upper East Side and studied there at the Brearley School from 1942 to 1944. There, she met Jackie Matisse, granddaughter of artist Henri Matisse; they would become lifelong friends. However, Saint Phalle was dismissed for painting in red the fig leaves on the school's classical statuary. Despite this, she would later say it was there “[that] I became a feminist. They inculcated in us that women can and must accomplish great things.” She was then enrolled in a convent school in Suffern, New York, but was expelled. She finally graduated from the Oldfields School in Glencoe, Maryland in 1947.
During her late teenage years, Saint Phalle became a fashion model; at the age of 18, she appeared on the cover of "Life" (26 September 1949) and, three years later, on the November 1952 cover of "French Vogue". She also appeared in the pages of "Elle" and "Harper's Bazaar".
First marriage and children (1949–1960).
At the age of 18, Saint Phalle married Harry Mathews, whom she had first met the age of 11 (he was 12) through her father. Six years later, they met each other by chance on a train to Princeton and soon became a couple. Initially, they had a civil ceremony on 6 June 1949 in New York City Hall. At the urging of Niki's mother, they also had a religious rite at the French Church of New York the following February.
Although her parents accepted the union, her husband's family objected to her Catholic background and cut them off financially, causing them to resort to occasional shoplifting. They moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts so Mathews could study music at Harvard University. Saint Phalle began to paint in oils and gouaches but aimed to pursue a career in acting. Their first child, Laura, was born in April 1951. In 1952, the small family moved to Paris, where Harry continued his studies in conducting at I’Ecole Normale de Musique. The new parents were casual, even negligent in their care, but their children would benefit from better financial circumstances after Mathews received an inheritance.
Saint Phalle rejected the staid, conservative values of her family, which dictated domestic positions for wives and particular strict rules of conduct. Poet John Ashbery recalled that Saint Phalle's artistic pursuits were rejected in turn by relatives: her uncle "French banker Count Alexandre de Saint-Phalle, ... reportedly takes a dim view of her artistic activities", Ashbery observed. However, after marrying young and becoming a mother, she found herself living the same bourgeois lifestyle that she had attempted to escape.
For about a decade, the family would wander around France and Europe, living a bohemian lifestyle. In Nice, Saint Phalle and Mathews would have separate affairs in 1953; after she attacked her husband's mistress, she took an overdose of sleeping pills, but they had little effect because she was manic at the time. When Harry discovered a stash of knives, razors, and scissors under a mattress, he took his wife to a mental clinic in Nice, where she was treated with electroshock therapy and insulin shock therapy. Liberated from routine household work, she focused on creating artwork instead and improved enough to be discharged in six weeks. Around the same time, her husband abandoned his music studies and started to write his first novel, eventually switching to a career in writing.
While in Paris on a modeling assignment in 1954, Saint Phalle was introduced to the American-French painter , who became both her friend and artistic mentor. He encouraged her to continue painting in her self-taught style.
In September 1954, the small family moved to Deià, Majorca, Spain, where her son Philip was born in May 1955. While in Spain, Saint Phalle read the works of Proust and visited Madrid and Barcelona, where she became deeply affected by the work of architect Antoni Gaudí. Gaudí's influence opened many previously unimagined possibilities for Saint Phalle, especially the use of unusual materials and "objets-trouvés" as structural elements in sculpture and architecture. Saint Phalle was particularly struck by Gaudí's "Park Güell" which would inspire her to one day create her own garden-based artwork that would combine artistic and natural elements.
Saint Phalle continued to paint, particularly after she and her family moved to Paris in the mid-1950s. Her first art exhibition was held in 1956 in Switzerland, where she displayed her naïve style of oil painting.
In 1956, she met the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely and his wife, artist Eva Aeppli. Saint Phalle attempted her first large-scale sculpture, enlisting Tinguely to make an iron armature, which she covered with plaster and paint.
In the late 1950s, Saint Phalle became ill with hyperthyroidism and tachycardia, which were eventually treated by an operation in 1958.
In 1959, Saint Phalle first encountered multiple artworks by Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp, Daniel Spoerri, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. Seeing these avant-garde works triggered her "first great artistic crisis". She switched from oil painting to gouaches and gloss paint, and began to produce assemblages from household objects and castoffs. By this time, she had decided to dedicate herself fully to creating art, free from the obligations of everyday family life.
In 1960, she and Harry separated by mutual agreement, and her husband moved to another apartment with their two children. At that time, her daughter Laura was nine, and her son Philip was five years old. Mathews would occasionally buy artworks from his wife as a way of providing her modest support, and she would visit him and the children periodically.
She soon moved in with Jean Tinguely, who by then had separated from his own wife, Eva Aeppli. He was becoming well known for his kinetic sculptures made from cast-off mechanisms and junk. In many ways, the pair were opposites, and sometimes had violent disagreements, and frequent affairs with others. They would live together intermittently and collaborate closely on artistic projects for over a decade before marrying in 1971. Two years later they separated, but remained on good terms and continued to collaborate on various projects up through Tinguely's death in 1991.
In 1960, Tinguely introduced her to Pontus Hultén, then the director of the Moderna Museet (Modern Museum) in Stockholm, Sweden. Over the next few years, he would invite her to participate in important exhibitions, and acquire her artworks for the museum. He would later become the first director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1974–1981), where he continued to be influential in promoting wider recognition of Saint Phalle's artwork.
"Tirs" (1961–1963).
Saint Phalle created a series of works in the early 1960s she called "Tirs" ("Shootings" or "Shots"). The series began as "target pictures", with painted bullseye targets prominently displayed within her painted collages, such as "Saint Sébastien (Portrait of My Lover/Portrait of My Beloved/Martyr nécessaire)" (1961), or "Assemblage (Figure with Dartboard Head)" (1962). She would invite viewers to throw darts at the dartboards embedded as faces in her figurative assemblages, which were influenced by the targets painted by her friend Jasper Johns.
Soon, she would start by embedding knives, razor blades, scissors, eggbeaters, baby-doll arms, and other household items in plaster covering a large board, along with bags filled with colorful paints, cans of spray paint, and sometimes tomato. Also, she might suspend bags of paint or cans of spray paint in front of the white-painted assemblage. She would then repeatedly shoot the assemblage with a pistol, rifle, or miniature cannon, causing the liquids to "bleed" or to spray out. Her first staged public shooting event was in February 1961, attended by Jean Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri, and Pierre Restany, among others. As founder of the "Nouveau réalisme" ("New Realist") movement, Restany asked Saint Phalle to join this group of French artists upon seeing her performance; she was the only female member of this group.
These extreme expressions of violence attracted media attention, catapulting Saint Phalle into the ranks of avant-garde artistic rebellion. The "Tirs" combined performance, body art, sculpture, and painting, in the artistic ferment of the 1960s. Saint Phalle began to stage variations on this process in art museums and galleries and recruited other artists to join in staged public "happenings", where some of her colleagues would also pull the trigger. She met many other emerging artists through these performances, including Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, and Edward Kienholz. She would also invite gallery visitors to shoot at her assemblages.
She participated in Spoerri's "Edition MAT" ("Multiplication d’Art Transformable") program of multiple artwork editions, supplying simpler versions of her "Tir" works, with detailed instructions on how to shoot them with a .22 rifle. Saint Phalle carefully documented her artistic process in the "Tirs" with writing, still photos, and films. She would attach common readymade artifacts to a board, attach bags of colorful paint, whitewash everything, and then dip the assemblage into milk-white plaster. Once it had dried, the collection was ready for shooting by a purchaser.
In June 1961, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely joined Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in a concert-happening called "Variations II", orchestrated by avant-garde American composer John Cage, and held at the American Embassy in Paris. While David Tudor played Cage compositions on the piano, the artists created their works of art on stage as the audience watched the proceedings.
In August 1961, Marcel Duchamp introduced Saint Phalle and Tinguely to Salvador Dalí, who invited them to create a life-sized exploding bull with fireworks ("Toro de Fuego"). This "Homenage a Dalí" ("Homage to Dalí") was wheeled out after the end of a traditional Spanish bullfight, in Figueras, Catalonia, Spain, and exploded in front of the audience.
In 1962, she had her first one-woman show in New York City, at the gallery run by Alexander Iolas. It included "Homage to Le Facteur Cheval", a shooting gallery where visitors could fire on one of her "Tirs" installations. This began her long working relationship with the gallerist, eventually comprising at least 17 exhibitions of her work.
An exclusive 1962 open-air shooting event in the Malibu Hills above Los Angeles was attended by Hollywood celebrities, including Jane Fonda and John Houseman. In most of these public performances, Saint Phalle was impeccably dressed in a fashionable white pantsuit.
By 1963, she had taken the series to galleries in New York City and Los Angeles, inviting the public to participate in the shootings. In Los Angeles, she shot a large-scale "King Kong" assemblage she had constructed, paint-splattering the embedded sculpted faces of politicians such as John F Kennedy, Fidel Castro, and Charles De Gaulle, with Santa Claus and Donald Duck as well. This work would later be acquired by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and would mark her transition to a new series of fantastic monsters, animals, and female figures. Throughout her career, snakes, birds, and dragons would become recurring symbols in her artworks.
While in New York City, Saint Phalle and Tinguely stayed in the Hotel Chelsea in 1962, and again in 1964-1965.
In 1963, the couple purchased an old hotel, called "Auberge au Cheval Blanc" ("White Horse Inn"), in Soisy-sur-Ecole, southeast of Paris. It had previously been a hotel, a café, a cinema, and even a brothel, but the new owners converted it into artistic studios which they would share over the decades to come.
"Nanas" (1964–1973).
Saint Phalle next explored the various roles of women, in what would develop into her best-known and most prolific series of sculptures. She started making life-size dolls of women, such as brides and mothers giving birth, monsters, and large heads. Initially, they were made of soft materials, such as wool, cloth, and papier-mâché, but they soon evolved into plaster over a wire framework and plastic toys, some painted all white.
As the series developed into larger monumental works, Saint Phalle used composite fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic (also known as FRP or GRP) decorated with multiple bright-colored acrylic or polyester paints. She also used polyurethane foam in many of her sculptures. These innovative materials enabled the construction of colorful, large-scale sculptures with new ease and fluidity of form. Saint Phalle unknowingly used dangerous fabrication and painting processes that released glass fibers and chemicals, including styrene, epoxy, and toxic solvents.
In 1963–64, she created a series of sculptures protesting stereotypical societal roles for women, as child bearers, devouring mothers, witches, and prostitutes. Some of her early artworks from this "Bride" period depicted ghostly, skeletal brides dressed in white, which have been compared to Miss Havisham, an ethereal character in Charles Dickens' novel "Great Expectations".
Over time, these figures became more joyful, whimsical, colorful, and larger in scale. Inspired by a collaborative drawing with American artist Larry Rivers of his wife, her pregnant friend Clarice Price, Saint Phalle began to portray archetypal female figures with a more optimistic view of the position of women in society. The newer figures took on ecstatic dance poses and even acrobatic positions, such as handstands and cartwheels. Saint Phalle's light-hearted figures have been compared to the joyful dancers of Matisse and the sturdy female figures by Gaston Lachaise, Aristide Maillol, and Rodin.
By 1965, she was calling her artistic expressions of the proverbial everywoman "Nanas", after a French slang word that is roughly equivalent to "broad", or "chick".
The first of these freely-posed forms—made of papier-mâché, yarn, and cloth—were exhibited at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in Paris in September 1965. During this show, she joined a type of tombola raffle organized by the Artist's Club of New York, whereby artworks were randomly left in coin-operated luggage lockers at Pennsylvania Station, and keys were offered for $10 each.
For this show, Iolas also published Saint Phalle's first artist book that included her handwritten text in combination with her drawings of "Bananas". Encouraged by Iolas, she started a highly productive output of graphics work that accompanied her exhibitions, which included silk-screened prints, posters, books, and writings. In the years to come, she would publish multiple hand-lettered books, profusely illustrated with colorful drawings and diagrams, on topics such as AIDS prevention and various periods in her life story.
In 1966, Saint Phalle collaborated with Jean Tinguely and on a temporary indoor sculpture installation, "Hon – en katedral" (which means "She-a-Cathedral" in Swedish), filling a large temporary gallery in the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm, Sweden. During construction, Saint Phalle recruited Swiss art student , who had been working as a dishwasher in the museum restaurant (in the following years, he would become a vital assistant and collaborator for both Saint Phalle and Tinguely). A team of 8 people worked strenuously for 40 days, first building a frame using metal rebar, covering it with chicken wire, sheathing it with fabric attached with smelly animal glue, and then painting the inside of the enclosure black, and painting the outside in bright colors. The final structure was long and wide, weighing around .
The outer form was a giant, reclining sculpture of a pregnant woman (a "Nana"), whose voluminous interior could be entered through a door-sized vaginal opening between her legs. Written on one of "Hon"'s massive thighs was the motto "Honi soit qui mal y pense" ("May he be shamed who thinks badly of it"). Inside the massive sculpture were a 12-seat cinema theater, a milk bar inside a breast, a fish pond, and a brain built by Tinguely, with moving mechanical parts. In addition, the sprawling "Nana" contained a coin telephone, a love-seat sofa, a museum of fake paintings, a sandwich vending machine, an art installation by Ultvedt, and a playground slide for children.
After an initial shocked silence, the installation elicited extensive public commentary in magazines and newspapers throughout the world, raising awareness of the Moderna Museet. Over 100,000 visitors crowded in to experience the immersive environment, including many children. At the end of 3 months, the entire temporary setup was demolished and removed, except for the head, which was preserved by the museum in its permanent collection. Some small fragments were attached to limited-edition exhibition catalogs and sold as mementos.
Around this time, Saint Phalle also designed stage sets and costumes for theatrical productions: "Éloge de La Folie" ("Praise of the Madness", 1966), a ballet by Roland Petit; an adaptation of the Aristophanes play "Lysistrata" (1966); and a German-language play she co-wrote with Rainer von Diez titled "ICH (All About Me)" (1968). Large fixed or moveable "Nana" figures were prominent in several of these productions.
In 1967, Saint Phalle began working with polyester resin, a material which could be shaped easily but would transform into a hard, smooth, weather-resistant surface. This new technology enabled her to construct large, fantastical figures for display outdoors in public spaces and parks. The material is reasonably durable outdoors (similar materials are used for boats and car bodies), although decades of weather exposure can eventually cause deterioration, requiring specialized art conservation measures.
In August 1967, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam opened Saint Phalle's first retrospective exhibition, "Les Nanas au pouvoir" ("Nana Power"). For the show, Niki created her first "Nana Dream House" and "Nana Fountain", and also showed plans for her first "Nana Town".
In 1967, she exhibited "Le Paradis Fantastique" ("The Fantastic Paradise"), a collaborative grouping of nine of her sculptures with six machines built by Tinguely, on the rooftop terrace of the 8-level French Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. The composition was originally conceived of as an attack by Tinguely's dark mechanical constructions upon Saint Phalle's brightly-colored animals and female figures, a kind of "amorous warfare".
Although the French Pavilion itself was popular, most visitors did not see the rooftop terrace where the sculptures were installed. In 1968, the sculptures were re-displayed at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and then for a year in New York City's Central Park. In 1971, some of the artworks were purchased by the Moderna Museet, and permanently installed nearby in an outdoor sculpture garden on Skeppsholmen, an island in central Stockholm.
In 1968, she first disclosed that she had developed respiratory problems from exposure to dust and fumes in making her artwork.
Starting in 1968, Saint Phalle sold "Nana" inflatable pool toys, which appeared in the April 1968 issue of "Vogue" magazine. She ignored complaints from art critics, focusing on raising money for her future monumental projects. In the coming years, she would face more criticism for over-commercializing and popularizing her artwork, but she raised significant funding that enabled her to finance several ambitious projects on her own. During her career, she produced clothing, jewelry, perfume, glass or porcelain figures, furniture, and craft items, many with a "Nana" theme.
From 1969 to 1971, she worked on her first full-scale architecture project, three small sculptural houses for Rainer von Diez in southern France, which she called "" ("The Dream of the Bird"). The project was a collaboration with him and Jean Tinguely, and a forerunner of her later "Tarot Garden" project.
In 1969, she joined several other artists under the lead of Tinguely, starting work on "Le Cyclop" ("Cyclops", also known as "La Tête", "The Head", or "le Monstre dans la forêt", "the Monster in the forest"), in Milly-la-Forêt, near Paris. Collaborators included Daniel Spoerri, Bernhard Luginbuhl, and Eva Aeppli. Eventually, 15 different people worked on the project, which would not be considered finished until 1994.
In an interview on television, she shared her views about the place of women in politics and said "I think women could administer this world much better. If Black power and women power would get together, they would take over everything. That's the solution. A new world of joy."
In November 1970, as part of an artists' reunion celebrating the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Nouveaux Réalistes, Saint Phalle shot at an altar assemblage.
On 13 July 1971, Saint Phalle and Tinguely legally married, perhaps for tax savings, as Saint Phalle thus became a Swiss citizen. Their marriage did give the two artists mutual control over each other's artistic estate if one of them should die. That same year, she designed her first pieces of jewelry.
In 1972, she installed "Golem", commissioned by the then mayor Teddy Kollek, at a children's playground in the Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood of Jerusalem. It is a giant monster with three red tongues protruding from its mouth, which serve as playground slides.
Starting in 1972, she engaged Robert Haligon ("Fabricant de Plastiques d’Art") to help fabricate her large-scale sculptures, as well as various editions of artworks. This collaboration would continue for 25 years, including all four of his children, notably Gérard, who would take the lead in later years. The collaboration would produce approximately 3,000 sculptures, ranging from monumental outdoors pieces to small multiple editions. Saint Phalle personally trained daughter Marie Haligon to paint her multiple edition sculptures, following a master artist's prototype. Initially, the artist preferred a matte paint finish, shunning shiny surfaces. However, she was forced to adopt glossy surface finishes to attain improved durability of the paints on her outdoors sculptures. Over time, she embraced this glossy visual effect, and began using mirrors and polished stones to surface her artworks.
In 1972, Saint Phalle shot footage for her surreal horror film "Daddy", about a deeply troubled father-daughter love-hate relationship. The filming was done in a rented castle near Grasse in southeastern France in association with filmmaker Peter Whitehead. In November, the film was shown in London. The following January, she produced a new version of the film, with additional scenes in Soisy and New York, and an expanded cast. The revised version premiered at Lincoln Center for the 11th New York Film Festival in April. She was also commissioned to design the cover of the program for the festival.
In 1973, Saint Phalle worked with Tinguely and Rico Weber on a commission from Roger and Fabienne Nellens to build a playhouse in the garden of their home in seaside Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium. The "Le Dragon" they built was a substantial structure, high and long, made using techniques derived from the earlier "Le Rêve de l'oiseau" project. The fantastical building would eventually include a kitchen, bathroom, toilet, heating system, and bedroom, at an estimated cost of $30,000 to $40,000. The exterior was decorated with bright paintings, including ones done by Roger Nellens and the Formula 1 race-car driver Jacky Ickx. Similar to the "Golem" project the previous year, a long tongue formed an exterior slide from the upper level.
In 1987, graffiti artist Keith Haring would live in "Le Dragon" while working on a mural at nearby Knokke Casino, and would return for at least three summers. With Saint Phalle's enthusiastic consent, he would paint a long fresco along an interior stairway wall. Eventually, the building would be designated a Monument Historique of Belgium, though it would remain private property.
Saint Phalle continued to create "Nanas" for the rest of her life, but would soon focus her attention on a comprehensive project in Italy.
"Tarot Garden" (1974–1998).
In 1955, Saint Phalle had visited Antoni Gaudí's Parc Güell in Barcelona, Spain, which inspired her to use diverse materials and found objects as essential elements in her art. Another influence was the Parco dei Mostri in Bomarzo, in the Tuscany region of Italy. In the late 1950s, she and Jean Tinguely had visited "Le Palais Idéal" built by Ferdinand Cheval in Hauterives, France, as well as Simon Rodia's "Watts Towers" in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. Both these latter locations were examples of fantastical outsider art and architecture built by ordinary working men of modest means but an expansive vision. Saint Phalle decided that she wanted to make something similar: a magnificent sculpture garden, but created by a woman.
The initial sponsors for her ambitious project were members of the Italian Agnelli family. In 1974, Saint Phalle became ill with a pulmonary abscess from her work with polyester and was hospitalized in Arizona. She then recuperated in St. Moritz, Switzerland. She reconnected with Marella Agnelli, a friend from the 1950s in New York, and told Agnelli about her ideas for a fantasy garden. In 1978, Agnelli's brothers Carlo and Nicola Caracciolo offered a parcel of their land in Tuscany for the garden's site.
In 1975, Saint Phalle wrote the screenplay for "Un rêve plus long que la nuit" ("A Dream Longer Than the Night", later also called "Camélia et le Dragon"), and she recruited many of her artist friends to help make it into a film, a phantasmagorical tale of dragons, monsters, and adolescence. A young girl is held captive by a dragon, manages to escape, and must explore "Sept Portes du Mystère" ("Seven Doors of Mystery") to find love. Saint Phalle's daughter Laura was the lead character in the film, appearing with Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and other artist friends; Peter Whitehead composed the music. For the filming, she designed several pieces of furniture, which were later displayed on the facade of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. From 1968 to 1988, she also worked on "Last Night I Had a Dream", a sculptural relief painting that included many elements from her earlier life and dreams.
In 1976, she retreated to the Swiss Alps to refine her plans for the sculpture park. In 1977 Ricardo Menon, an Argentinian, became her assistant; he would work closely with her until 1986.
In 1977, she worked with the English writer Constantin Mulgrave to design sets for "The Traveling Companion", based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, but the project was never completed. She and Mulgrave lived together for around four years, but Tinguely remained a continually reappearing presence in her life.
In 1977, she also visited Mexico and New Mexico, in search of more extensive artistic inspirations.
In 1978, Saint Phalle started to lay out her sculpture garden in an abandoned quarry in Garavicchio, Tuscany, about north-west of Rome near the west coast of the Italian peninsula. The following year, sites were cleared, and foundations were established.
In 1979, she produced the first of what would become a new series of sculptures, the "Skinnies". These were flat, planar, see-through outlines of heads and figures, highlighted by patches of color. In some ways, they resembled her colorful sketches and drawings but scaled up to monumental size. The series also symbolized Saint Phalle's struggles against emphysema and illness. She continued to produce her "Nanas" in addition to her new style of sculpture, and both styles of figures would appear in her "Tarot Garden" project.
In 1980, Saint Phalle and her team began to build the first architectural sculpture in the garden. As the project progressed, Saint Phalle started taking lessons in the Italian language, to better communicate with local workers. The second crew member she hired was Ugo Celletti, a 50-year-old part-time postal delivery man, who discovered a love for mosaic work on the project. He would work on the project for 36 years and recruit his nephews to join in; some family members are still involved in maintaining the site.
She invited artist friends from Argentina, Scotland, Holland, and France to help work on the sculptures. Over time, Saint Phalle worked with dozens of people, including architects, ceramicists, ironworkers, bricklayers, painters, and mosaic artists. The materials used in the "Tarot Garden" project would include steel, iron, cement, polyester, ceramic, mosaic glass, mirrors, and polished stones (which she called "M&M's").
The structure of the more massive sculptures was very similar to the temporary "Hon" installation at the Moderna Museet in 1966, but this time the artworks were outdoors and needed to withstand the long-term weathering effects of sun and rain. The basic shape of the sculptures was established with frameworks made of welded steel rebar. A second layer of lighter-gauge steel reinforcement bars was added, followed by two layers of expanded metal. A specialist firm was then brought in to spray shotcrete onto the structure. A layer of tar for waterproofing and a final layer of white cement produced a sturdy, hollow structure ready for decoration.
In 1980, she also began selling a series of polyester snake chairs, vases, and lamps. That year, she recorded her first attack of rheumatoid arthritis, a painful disease affecting the joints of the skeleton.
In 1980–1981, she designed a colorful paint scheme for a Piper Aerostar 602 P twin-engine airplane, which participated in the first trans-Atlantic race sponsored by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation of Amsterdam. As an act of playful rebellion against the cigarette manufacturer sponsor, she added a "No Smoking" sign visible on the belly of the plane (she was allergic to tobacco smoke).
In 1981, Saint Phalle rented a small house near the "Tarot Garden" and hired young people from Garavicchio to help with construction of the garden. Jean Tinguely led a Swiss team, comprising Seppi Imhoff and Rico Weber, and started welding the frames of the sculptures. The following year, Dutch artist Doc Winsen (also called "Dok van Winsen") took up the welding operations.
In 1982, she developed and marketed an eponymous perfume, using the proceeds to help finance her project. The perfume bottle top featured a small sculpture of two intertwined snakes, one golden and the other brightly multicolored. She may have raised as much as a third of the funds she needed for the garden in this way. She actively solicited funding from friends and acquaintances, as well as by selling her artworks.
In 1982, Saint Phalle collaborated with Tinguely to produce the "Stravinsky Fountain", a 15-piece sculptural fountain for Igor Stravinsky Square, located next to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Because of its prominent location in Paris, it would become one of the best-known collaborations between the two artists.
From 1983 until 1988 when on site, Saint Phalle lived in a small apartment built into "The Empress", a house-sized sphinx-like sculpture in the garden. On the second level, her bedroom was inside one breast, and her kitchen was inside the other one. Each of these two rooms had a single recessed circular window, appearing as an inverted nipple when viewed from the outside. In 2000, she would recall: "At last, my lifelong wish to live inside a sculpture was going to be granted: a space entirely made out of undulating curves ... I wanted to invent a new mother, a mother goddess, and be reborn within its form ... I would sleep in one breast. In the other, I would put my kitchen".
The ground floor contained a large mirrored space with a mirrored dining table where she would serve lunch to workers and artists, beneath a chandelier Tinguely had made with a cow skull. She used this motherly role to help reinforce her authority in directing the team of men she needed to help build her project. Eventually, she would grow tired of the cramped space "in the womb of her mother", and after 1988 would move into a New-York-loft-style studio which she had built for herself underground at the site. Her assistant Ricardo Menon would live in the "Tower of Babel" structure while on site, working closely with Saint Phalle and caring for her during crippling arthritis flareups.
Around 1983, Saint Phalle decided to cover her "Tarot Garden" sculptures primarily in durable ceramic colored tiles, adding shards of mirrors and glass, and polished stones. Menon helped her recruit Venera Finocchiaro, a ceramics teacher from Rome; she taught local women new techniques for molding ceramic pieces to curved surfaces and installed on-site ovens to finish the pieces. Starting in 1985, Jean Tinguely added motorized and stationary steel sculptures and fountains to the project. Robert Haligon and his sons did much of the work which involved polyester resins. Saint Phalle asked Pierre Marie Lejeune to create a cement path, which he inscribed with hieroglyphs, other signs and symbols, and text. During this period, Saint Phalle dedicated almost all of her time to living and working in the garden.
In 1986 Menon left to attend a drama school in Paris, but kept secret from Saint Phalle that he had contracted AIDS. While there, he recruited fellow Argentinian Marcelo Zitelli to work for Saint Phalle as a gardener, but he in turn became her assistant for other work as well, helping her fabricate sculptures for at least the next decade. The same year, Saint Phalle took some time to collaborate with (a German medical professor of immunology) in writing and illustrating her book "AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands", intended for students in middle school or high school. It was first published in San Francisco in English, then later translated into five different languages; 70,000 copies were sold or given to medical institutions and schools.
From 1987 to 1993, Saint Phalle spent more of her time in Paris, where she developed many of the smaller sculptures for the garden. From time to time, she would organize gallery shows of her art, including maquettes of her more significant works, to raise funds for the garden project. Saint Phalle also worked on establishing a permanent legal structure for the preservation and maintenance of the garden.
In 1991, she produced a maquette for "Le Temple Idéal" ("The Ideal Temple"), a place of worship welcoming all religions, in response to the religious intolerance she saw while working in Jerusalem. The city of Nîmes (France) commissioned her to build the architectural sculpture, but the project never was constructed, due to politics. Over the years, she had become interested in myths and religious traditions beyond her childhood Roman Catholic upbringing, including Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and ancient Egyptian beliefs.
In 1992–1993, corrective maintenance on the "Tarot Garden" sculptures was performed, using new glues and silicones to attach mirrors and glass elements more securely, to withstand weathering and the touch of many visitors' hands. , a similar restoration process of re-attaching mirrors was ongoing with "Le Cyclop", located in Milly-la-Forêt, near Paris.
The "Tarot Garden" was under development for almost 30 years, and $5 million (roughly $11 million in 2016 dollars) was spent to construct it. The Foundation of the Tarot Garden was constituted in 1997 (and would attain official juridical status in 2002), and the garden officially opened to the public on 15 May 1998. The completed garden (called "il Giardino dei Tarocchi" in Italian, and "le Jardin des Tarots" in French) now contains sculptures and architectural sculptures representing the 22 cards of Major Arcana found in the Tarot deck of cards, plus other smaller artworks. The site covers around on the southern slope of the hill of Gravicchio, in Capalbio. The tallest sculptures are about high.
Saint Phalle's friend, architect Mario Botta, built a fortress-like protective wall and a porthole-shaped gateway at the entrance to the garden, marking a distinctive separation from the outside world. The entry structure also houses a ticket office, a gift shop, and restrooms for visitors. Within the park, there are fountains, courtyards, a multilevel tower, and many larger-than-life mythical creatures. Saint Phalle designed a brochure containing a map and other information for visitors to the garden, which is open seasonally.
Later years (1990–2002).
In her final years, Saint Phalle was afflicted with emphysema, asthma, and severe arthritis, which she and many commentators attributed to exposure to glass fibers, fumes, and petrochemicals from materials used in her artworks. Despite these handicaps, she launched into exploring new venues, new technologies, and new art media.
In 1989, Ricardo Menon, Saint Phalle's former assistant, died of AIDS; his loss plunged Saint Phalle into depression. She created a large mosaic sculpture of a cat, "Chat de Ricardo", to serve as his cemetery headstone in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris, France. She placed a second copy of the memorial sculpture in her "Tarot Garden" in Tuscany, where he had worked closely with her for nearly a decade.
In 1990, Saint Phalle completed "Skull (Meditation Room)", a tall room-sized skull-shaped enclosure surfaced in colorful mosaics and lined inside with mosaic mirrors, to memorialize the AIDS crisis. She also used bronze for the first time, in a series of Egyptian gods and goddesses.
In August 1991, Jean Tinguely died suddenly of a heart attack in Bern, Switzerland. During his previous two years of declining health, he had stopped taking medication and began preparing for death. The couple had separated years ago, but remained very close; the loss of her longtime collaborator and intimate friend affected Saint Phalle deeply. She was writing a memoir letter about their first meeting when news of his death reached her.
In his memory, Saint Phalle created her first kinetic sculptures, which she called "Méta-Tinguelys". With initial assistance from her artist friend Larry Rivers, she created a series of kinetic reliefs or moving paintings, called "Tableaux Éclatés" ("Shattered Paintings"), in homage to her late husband and colleague. When a visitor approached, a photocell would trigger motors which caused elements of the paintings to separate.
Saint Phalle lost many friends and associates to AIDS, including Jean-Jacques Goetzman, who died in 1992. She memorialized him with "Oiseau pour Jean-Jacques" ("Bird for Jean-Jacques"), a large reflective abstract bird sculpture at Montparnasse Cemetery.
As her health deteriorated, she worked on creating the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, as well as continuing work on her "Tarot Garden". During this time, she became a good friend of the museum's architect Mario Botta, and she also engaged him to design the wall and entryway to her "Tarot Garden".
In 1994, Saint Phalle published her hand-illustrated and hand-colored memoirs "Mon Secret" ("My Secret") in French and revealed her childhood history of sexual abuse. In 1999, she released "Traces", an English-language autobiography, which she also illustrated. In 2006, "Harry and Me: The Family Years; 1950–1960" was published (posthumously), consisting of her self-illustrated memoirs from the decade when she was married to Harry Mathews.
Saint Phalle moved from Paris to La Jolla, California in 1994 for health reasons. She set up a new studio and produced sculptures which were covered with mirrors, glass, and polished stones, instead of paints. In her new workspace, she started to explore novel technologies for designing and creating artwork. She also became an active member of the San Diego art scene, participating in fund-raisers and exhibitions there.
In 1994 she designed a stamp for Swiss Post, with the message "Stop AIDS/Stop SIDA", for which she was awarded the Prix Caran d’Ache. She also began a series of silkscreened works, which she called "California Diary", featuring local fauna. She started a new series of "Totem" pillars of stacked human or animal figures and anatomical fragments.
In 1994, she finally declared the collaborative sculpture "Le Cyclop", started in 1969 by Tinguely and worked on by 15 artists, to be finished. The President of France, François Mitterrand, opened the work to the general public in May. To control vandalism, the installation was donated to the French state, which has taken responsibility for its safeguarding and maintenance. The massive structure is tall, weighs , and is filled with custom-built artworks, including a giant rolling ball sculpture. Many of the artworks are kinetic, endowing the installation with constant motion, and producing loud groaning and other mechanical noises.
In October 1994, the Niki Museum, dedicated to telling the story of her life and artwork, was opened in Nasu, Japan. However, the Niki Museum would later be forced to close in 2011.
In 1994, Saint Phalle worked with Peter Schamoni in making a documentary film about her life story, "Niki de Saint Phalle: Wer ist das Monster – Du oder ich?" ("Who is the Monster, You or I?"). In 1995, the film was awarded the Bavarian Film Award for best documentary.
In 1996, she began building "Gila", a large dragon-shaped children's playhouse for a San Diego private residence. This project was her first use of digital techniques to enlarge drawings into full-scale construction.
In 1996, she supported the opening of the Museum Tinguely in Basel, by donating 55 major sculptures and over 100 graphic works by Tinguely, which constituted much of the core collection. She also donated some of her and her husband's artwork to create at the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Fribourg, Switzerland.
In 1997, she designed snake chairs of wood with a mosaic inlay, made by Del Cover and Dave Carr.
In 1998, she created a series of "Black Heroes" sculptures in honor of African-Americans who made major contributions to sports or jazz, including Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and Josephine Baker. She dedicated the series to her great-grandchildren, who are of mixed race. She also completed her series of 23 large animals for the "Noah's Ark" sculptural park at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo with the assistance of her international team of artisans, and in collaboration with architect Mario Botta.
In 1999, she debuted a monumental statue of "Buddha", a one-eyed contemplative figure seated in the lotus position. The figure is covered with glittering mosaic tiles, glass, mirrors, and polished stones.
On 17 November 2000, she became an honorary citizen of Hannover, Germany, and donated 300 pieces of her artwork to the Sprengel Museum located there. In 2000, the artist was awarded the Praemium Imperiale award for sculpture, by the Japan Art Association. The award is considered to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the world of art.
In 2001, she gave 170 pieces to the Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain (MAMAC) in Nice, France, and donated other works to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
She also designed and built for the Port of San Diego a tall, 10-ton sculpture, "Coming Together". The largest of her "Skinnies" series, the artwork consists of a colorful half female and a black-and-white half male face joined together, covered with mosaic and stones. The dedication ceremony was delayed to 25 October 2001 because of the September 11 attacks the previous month; the artist was unable to attend because of her deteriorating health. The artwork signified her interpretation of yin and yang, sickness and health, and the integration of dual aspects into a unified whole.
Saint Phalle endured intensive care hospitalization for six months before dying of respiratory failure (caused by emphysema) at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, on 21 May 2002. She was attended by her first husband Harry Mathews, and their children.
Up until the end, she continued to design further developments for her "Tarot Garden" in Italy, including a maze, for which land was cleared, and metal rods were installed. Upon her death, all new developments in her garden were halted, as she had previously specified. Since then, some modest changes have been implemented, mostly to accommodate an increasing number of visitors. A garden cafe designed by Mario Botta has also been constructed. One salient exception is the Tarot figure of "Le Fou" ("The Fool"), which Saint Phalle relocated within the "Tarot Garden" at least twice during her life. This symbolic migrational tradition is expected to be continued from time to time.
Posthumously, the "Grotto" (2001–2003) was completed according to detailed instructions left by Saint Phalle. The permanent installation, in the "Grosser Garten", Herrenhausen Gardens, Hannover, consisted of three rooms which were decorated on every surface with mirrors, glass, ceramics, and colored stones.
Posthumously, "Queen Califia's Magical Circle" (2000–2003), a diameter sun-drenched sculpture garden designed by Saint Phalle, was opened in Escondido, California in October 2002. It is enclosed in a undulating wall topped with large python-like snakes, and includes a maze and 10 large sculptures she designed, comprising the most extensive public collection of her work in the US. The decorations include symbols and plaques referring to her earlier "Tarot Garden".
Legacy.
Throughout her career, Saint Phalle was outspoken in addressing important religious conflict, political, pandemic health, race, gender, and cultural issues of the time. Her "Tirs" series and assemblages reflected the violence of the early 1960s Algerian War for independence from France and asserted her rebellion as part of second-wave feminism. In spite of the spectacular use of firearms in her "Tirs" series of early work, she supported gun control.
Her enormous, curvaceous "Nanas" celebrated the fecund female form, featuring large breasts and buttocks, splayed limbs, joyous dance postures, and often, black skin. She was one of the earliest artistic champions of AIDS awareness, creating artworks and a widely distributed educational book. Shortly before her death, she exhibited drawings critical of the George W Bush administration. In addition to her artworks, she wrote extensively in both French and English, and granted numerous interviews; much of this material is collected in her archives.
Public art.
Many of Saint Phalle's sculptures are large and are exhibited in public places. The Niki Charitable Art Foundation maintains an online map and catalog of all her extant public artworks, including a pizza oven in La Jolla, California.
Museums and collections.
A “Jean Tinguely–Niki de Saint Phalle Museum” exists in Fribourg, Switzerland, entirely dedicated to her and her husbands’ works.
The Sprengel Museum has the largest holdings of Niki de Saint Phalle's work, and other major holdings are at MAMAC. Her archives and artistic rights are held by the Niki Charitable Art Foundation (NCAF) in Santee, California, near San Diego, which became active upon her passing. The NCAF maintains an online catalog of artworks in museums and major collections.
Bibliography (by publication date).
A short, annotated bibliography is available at the Niki Charitable Art Foundation website.
, a definitive online catalogue raisonné is being compiled.
Film.
A comprehensive listing is at the Niki Charitable Art Foundation website.


Petra Cabrera

Petra Cabrera-Badia is a Virgin Islander beauty queen who represented her country in the Miss World 2013 pageant held in Bali, Indonesia.
Biography.
Early life and career beginnings.
Petra was born in Dominican Republic but resided in U.S. Virgin Islands for several years now.
She is working in a medical office support role, she has ambitions of studying Business Administration with a view to starting her own business.
Miss World 2013.
Miss World 2013, the 63rd edition of the Miss World pageant was held on September 28, 2013 at Bali Nusa Dua Convention Center in Bali, Indonesia. 127 contestants from all over the world competed, making the biggest turnout in the pageant's history.
When she won in the national competition, Petra got the right to represent U.S Virgin Islands in Miss World. She flew to Indonesia to take part in the said pageant where she was unplaced. During the "Beach Fashion" round in the preliminaries, Petra was able to be part of the Top 32 but she lost to the Brazil's representative, Sancler Frantz.
The 2013 edition was won by Megan Young of the Philippines.


Farah Eslaquit

Farah Eslaquit Cano is a Mexican-Nicaraguan model and beauty pageant titleholder who was crowned Miss Nicaragua 2012 and represented her country at Miss Universe 2012. She has a Diploma in Fashion, Modeling and Etiquette Course.
Miss Nicaragua 2012.
The representative for Masaya, Farah Eslaquit was crowned "Miss Nicaragua 2012" by Miss Nicaragua 2011 Adriana Dorn at the Ruben Dario National Theater in Managua on Saturday night of March 17, 2012. Nicaraguan people who follow closely these pageants were a little apprehensive about her being chosen as the representative for Miss Universe 2012, because she was not born in Nicaragua. Claudia Cuadra Cardenal and Alejandra Borge were heavy favorites to win the crown for 2012. She also won the titles of Miss Popularity and Miss Virtual Nicaragua in the national pageant.
As Nicaragua's representative to the Miss Universe pageant, she took the title of 5th Runner-Up for the National Costume competition, ultimately won by China's Xu Jidan.
As of 2014, Eslaquit was modeling in Nicaragua and working with the country's tourism board, among other projects.


Jerome Kersey

Jerome Kersey (June 26, 1962 – February 18, 2015) was an American professional basketball player in the National Basketball Association (NBA). He played for the Portland Trail Blazers (1984–1995), Golden State Warriors (1995–96), Los Angeles Lakers (1996–97), Seattle SuperSonics (1997–98), San Antonio Spurs (1998–2000), and Milwaukee Bucks (2000–01). Kersey won an NBA championship with the Spurs in 1999.
The Trail Blazers selected Kersey in the second round of the 1984 NBA draft from Longwood University (then Longwood College) in Farmville, Virginia. He was a member of the Spurs during their 1999 NBA Finals victory over the New York Knicks. Following his playing career, Kersey worked with his former Portland teammate and then-head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks Terry Porter as an assistant in 2005. Kersey died from a pulmonary embolism caused by a blood clot at his home in Tualatin, Oregon, on February 18, 2015.
College career.
Kersey attended the then Longwood College, at the time an NCAA Division II school, where he set school records for points, rebounds, steals and blocked shots while making 57% of his baskets. As a senior, his rebounding average of 14.2 led all Division II players. However, it was not until May 2006 that Kersey graduated from Longwood, having only needed two more college courses to graduate for some years.
NBA career.
Coming from a school that was not known as a basketball powerhouse, Kersey was selected in the second round of the 1984 NBA draft (46th overall pick) by the Portland Trail Blazers. He was a regular contributor from the bench, eventually becoming a starter, and by his third year, he began to shine, even coming in second behind Michael Jordan in the Slam Dunk Contest.
The 1987–88 season, was his best statistically, as he averaged 19.2 points and 8.3 rebounds. He became a starter and was part of the nucleus of a strong Portland team, along with Clyde Drexler, Terry Porter, Buck Williams, and Kevin Duckworth that made it to the NBA Finals two out of the next three years (in 1990 and 1992). However, in subsequent years Clifford Robinson would take his place and Kersey found himself spending more time on the bench.
By 1995, Portland had several talented forwards, and he was left unprotected in that year's expansion draft when he was selected by the Toronto Raptors, but they waived him before the 1995–96 season began. He signed with the Golden State Warriors, where he started 58 games, and had an altercation with Latrell Sprewell, which resulted in the latter threatening to bring a gun to practice. For the 1996–97 season Kersey signed with the Los Angeles Lakers as a free agent, and he had a quite productive year, logging his most playing time in five seasons, because trades and injuries had left the Lakers thin. The 1997–98 season saw him go to his fourth team in four years, but injuries kept him out of the Seattle SuperSonics' lineup for most of the season.
For the lockout-shortened 1998–99 season, Kersey found himself on the San Antonio Spurs. The team won the 1999 NBA championship. Kersey provided frontcourt depth and experience off the bench in the team's title run, although his scoring, rebounding, and minutes played were all career lows. He stayed with the Spurs for another season and then spent one final season in the NBA with the Milwaukee Bucks, who fell short in the Eastern Conference Finals. He retired at the conclusion of the 2000–01 season.
As a Portland Trail Blazer, Kersey was near the top in many of Portland's career categories at the time of his leaving, including games played (second), minutes played (third), scoring (third), rebounding (second), assists (sixth), steals (third), field goals made (fourth), and blocked shots (second).
Following his retirement in 2001, Kersey served as a coach in various capacities for several teams. For a short time, Kersey worked for Wells Fargo home mortgages. During the 2003–04 NBA season, Kersey was hired by the Trail Blazers to serve as director of player programs. After a season in that capacity, Kersey was hired as an assistant coach by the Milwaukee Bucks, where he served under his former Portland teammate, head coach Terry Porter. He served with the Bucks for one year, but was let go (along with Mike Schuler, who coached both Kersey and Porter while in Portland) on May 6, 2005. Porter was subsequently fired as the Bucks' coach later that year. For a period of time following, Kersey joined the automotive industry as an auto wholesaler.
In November 2005, Kersey was in Longwood's first Hall of Fame class. Others included baseball player Michael Tucker and LPGA golfer Tina Barrett.
In 2008, Kersey was inducted into the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame and was selected to receive the 2015 recipient of the William Henry Ruffner Alumni Award, the highest award given to a Longwood alumni. The court at Willett Hall, Longwood's basketball facility, was posthumously named in his honor on December 3, 2016.
Personal life.
Kersey married his girlfriend of over nine years, Teri (Teresa Folsom) Donnerberg, on September 21, 2013 at the Columbia Edgewater Country Club in Portland, Oregon. Together, they have four children from previous relationships.
Death.
On February 18, 2015, Kersey died suddenly at the age of 52. Lake Oswego Fire Department and American Medical Response responded to a call from Kersey's home shortly after 5 pm, and he was taken to Legacy Meridian Park Medical Center in Tualatin, Oregon where he died. Just days prior to his death, Kersey underwent knee surgery. On the day of his death, he left the Trail Blazers' Rose Quarter office because he was not feeling well. Medical examiners linked his death to a blood clot that traveled to his lungs, causing a pulmonary embolism.


Yael Bar Zohar

Yael Bar Zohar (; ) is an Israeli television host, model, and actress.
Early life and career.
Bar Zohar was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, to a Jewish family. Her father Polish-born father Menachem Bar Zohar immigrated to Israel, and he is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Her mother Ella Fogel-Bar Zohar is Israeli-born. She has an older sister named Michal.
She was enlisted to the Israel Defense Forces in 1999, on an 'excellent artist/performer' clause. Bar Zohar served as a producer in the filming unit of the Israeli Air Force, although she ended her military service after a year (instead of the mandatory two for girls).
She started her modeling career wearing bathing suits in a swimwear catalogue, and filmed a commercial at the age of 15. She was cast for a role in the popular soap opera "Ramat Aviv Gimmel". She then turned to modelling She made her musical theater debut in the Israeli play "Mary-Lou", based on songs by Israeli singer Svika Pick. In 2005, she starred as Belle in the Israeli premiere of "Beauty and the Beast".
She has acted as 'mistress of ceremonies' for a group wedding in 2006.
Personal life.
Bar Zohar was previously in a relationship with Israeli actor and model Yehuda Levi, her co-star in the soap opera "Ramat Aviv Gimel".
In September 2005, Bar Zohar married Israeli actor and television host Guy Zu-Aretz. They have three children, and reside in Ramat HaSharon, Israel.


Marianne Cruz

Marianne Cruz González (April 23, 1985 in Salcedo) is a Dominican news presenter, model and beauty pageant titleholder who was crowned Miss Dominican Republic 2008 and represented her country at Miss Universe 2008.
Personal life.
Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Marianne is the youngest of three sisters. Her parents were divorced when she was young.
At the age of 16, Cruz began mountain climbing. She has climbed the highest elevation of the West Indies, The Pico Duarte, in Dominican Republic. Cruz is studying fashion design at Santo Domingo, and is the voice of many charity campaigns in Dominican Republic.
Beauty Pageants.
Miss Dominican Republic 2007.
Cruz participated in the Miss Dominican Republic 2007 beauty pageant. Despite her popularity, and her being the favorite candidate during the competition, she lost to Massiel Taveras the candidate from the province of Santiago.
Miss Continente Americano.
Later on Cruz went on to participate in the Miss Continente Americano 2007 beauty pageant. Cruz was declared the winner of Miss Continente Americano 2007 and was crowned by Mia Taveras of the Dominican Republic, becoming the first Miss Continente Americano to be crowned by a compatriot.
Miss Dominican Republic 2008.
After competing once again for the title of Miss Dominican Republic, 22-year-old Marianne Cruz became Miss Dominican Republic 2008, receiving the crown from Massiel Taveras, Miss Dominican Republic Universe 2007 and gaining the right to represent the Dominican Republic at Miss Universe 2008.
Miss Universe 2008.
After winning, she represented the Dominican Republic at Miss Universe 2008, where she finished as 2nd Runner-Up. This is the third highest position Dominican Republic has gotten in Miss Universe after Ada de la Cruz (Cruz' successor) placed 1st Runner-Up at Miss Universe 2009 and Amelia Vega won Miss Universe 2003. Cruz was also the second woman representing the Dominican Republic to place 2nd-Runner Up (the 1st was Renata Soñé in 2005).
Career in media.
Cruz has appeared in several magazines and has been hosting special events. She has been on some fashion runways and had a special appearance on Premios Cassandra and in the Dominican movie "Playball".
She has done several photoshoots for Dominican International fashion photographers.
Cruz is news anchor at "Noticias SIN" from 2010 to 2014, and then since 2014 at "AN 7". She is also radio host on “El sol de los sábados”.


Paul Vandervort

Paul Jeffrey Vandervort (born February 5, 1985) is an American actor, film producer, and former model.
Vandervort first appeared on the hit reality television series "The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency" during season 4. He is known on the modeling front, most notably for landing an international modeling campaign for Abercrombie & Fitch in 2008. Since, he has modeled for Ed Hardy, Zoom! Whitening, and Nike, as well as other companies.
One year after making his television debut, Vandervort continued to appear in various scripted TV shows and in 2010 made the switch to film appearing in several TV movies.
Vandervort formed indie production company, (VEI) Vandervort Entertainment Inc. VEI shot their first film, Hollywood Miles in April 2014. VEI's first full-length feature film, "Limelight", a screenplay written by Vandervort that he also starred in, was filmed in Los Angeles and Bel Air in Summer 2015 and completed post-production in 2017. Worldwide sales rights for Limelight were acquired by Taylor & Dodge and the movie is now available on Amazon Prime, iTunes, Google Play, and others distributed by Freestyle Digital Media.
Vandervort also creates digital content for social media platforms and he currently has around 400,000 fans on popular app TikTok.
The next feature film on Vandervort's queue is titled "Hardwired" in pre-production, has been temporarily paused due to Covid-19.
He currently resides in Los Angeles where he enjoys an active lifestyle. He is an avid surfer and keeps a totally plant-based diet. Vandervort is repped by Authentic Talent & Literary Management.


Brenda Castro

Brenda Giselle Castro Madrigal (born July 25, 1992, Guápiles, Limón, Costa Rica) is a Costa Rican model and beauty pageant titleholder who was crowned Miss Costa Rica 2015 and represented her country at the Miss Universe 2015 pageant. she also will represent Costa Rica at Miss Grand International 2019 in Caracas.
Personal life.
Brenda was born in Guápiles, Limón Province. Brenda started modeling at age 15. Before winning the Miss Costa Rica, she had previously won Señorita Expo-Pococí 2008, Miss Teenager Costa Rica 2011, Miss Latinoamérica Costa Rica 2014 and Señorita Verano Costa Rica 2015. She also had international placements as 2nd Runner-up Miss Teenager International 2011 and 3rd Runner-up Miss Latinoamerica International 2014.
Miss Costa Rica 2015.
Brenda was crowned Miss Costa Rica by Miss Universe Costa Rica 2014,Karina Ramos. Brenda was representing Limon at the pageant held in La Sabana and broadcast on Teletica. As Miss Costa Rica, she competed at the Miss Universe 2015 pageant on December 20, 2015, but didn't receive a placement.


Claudia Ortiz de Zevallos

Claudia Ortiz de Zevallos Cano was Miss Perú 2003. On 9 April 2005, she was third runner-up in the Miss Asia Pacific pageant. Prior to that participation, she was a semi-finalist in both Miss Earth 2002 and Miss Universe 2003 pageants.
In 2016, she was guest judge in the final Miss Peru 2016 beauty pageant, celebrated in the Ecological Center and Studios of America Television Production, Pachacamac, Lima, Peru.


Pedro Andrade

Pedro Andrade (born April 14, 1979) is a Brazilian journalist and model.
Career.
He began his acting career at the age of seven in Brazil. A student of journalism, Andrade originally came to the United States on a Poetry scholarship.
Andrade was discovered by fashion photographer Mario Testino and traveled the world modeling for clients like Giorgio Armani before joining LXTV (NBC's lifestyle network) in 2006, hosting television in New York Taxis. Besides hosting LXTV 1st Look TV, he has a show on LXTV.com called "On The Rocks: The Search for America's Top Bartender".
Andrade also runs a website about fashion, food, art, nightlife and entertainment.
He is also a reporter for Manhattan Connection, a Brazilian TV show at Globo News, Globo TV Cable News Network. On Brazilian radio he presents a weekly show, Conexão América (America Connection) at Eldorado FM Station. In 1999, Andrade appeared in LG Electronics TV Commercials.
Through volunteer work, donations and special appearances, Andrade supports a number of humanitarian causes such as Cancer Researchers , AIDS Research, Environmental Preservation, as well as a number of children's charities such as the Make a Wish Foundation and Big Brother. In 2007, he and his dog, Miles, appeared alongside Oprah Winfrey, Gisele Bündchen and Kelly Ripa in Pose For Paws, a coffee table book by photographer Brian Nice benefiting the Humane Society.
Personal life.
Andrade currently lives in West Village, New York City. He briefly dated Lance Bass, a former member of the band 'N Sync in the summer of 2007.


Carolina Gynning

Carolina Gynning Nilsson (born 6 October 1978) is a Swedish glamour model, actor, author, jewelry designer and television presenter. She started her career as a model at age sixteen. She was a participant in the Swedish version of "Big Brother" in 2004 and emerged as the winner of that season. Gynning has since made a career as a television presenter on TV4 and Kanal5, and also as an artist and author of several books. Gynning has participated in several television shows after "Big Brother" such as "I huvudet på Gynning" ("Inside Gynning's head") and as a celebrity dancer in season one of "Let's Dance".
Childhood and early life.
Gynning was born in Helsingborg, Sweden and lived in Höganäs for a short time, but spent most of her early years in Falsterbo. She revealed that she was a shy girl but changed when she reached her teens. She attended high school in Lund. At sixteen she was discovered by a fashion photographer while waiting at a bus stop in Falsterbo, and during her high school years she did some modelling assignments on the side. After a while, she landed modeling jobs in international shows in Athens, Milan and Paris. She lived and worked abroad for ten years mostly as a glamour model. During this time she also underwent breast implant surgery to enlarge her breasts.
Career.
TV personality and host.
After a few years working as a glamour model, Gynning was approached by producers of the Swedish version of the reality television show "Big Brother" and entered the house in January 2004, becoming the season's eventual winner. In 2006, she entered "Let's Dance" as a celebrity dancer. She appeared on Season 1 of the show which was broadcast on TV4. Her dance partner was Daniel da Silva and she was eliminated in the second round. During late 2006 she worked for Viasats Formula 1 show "Studio F1" along with Tore Kullgren and simultaneously was one of five hostesses for the TV4 show "Förkväll" (Tonight"). During 2007, Gynning hosted the audition part of "Idol 2007" along with Carina Berg. During 2008, Gynning hosted her own show, "I huvudet på Gynning" ("Inside Gynning's Head"), which was broadcast on Kanal5; she also hosted the talent show "Hitmakers" that year on the same channel. During late 2008 she and Carina Berg hosted the TV4 show "Stjärnor på is" the Swedish version of "Stars on Ice". In 2009 Gynning hosted "Hjälp! Jag är med i en japansk TV-show" ("Help! I am in a Japanese TV Show!") also on TV4 and in the summer of that year hosted "Sommarkrysset" ("The summer cruise") along with Berg. In 2013 she was one of the celebrity hosts of the radio show "Sommar i P1". In 2014, Gynning was scheduled to be one of the judges in the new season of "Talang Sverige 2014" ("Talent Sweden") on TV3.
Actress.
A few months before Gynning participated as a housemate in "Big Brother", she appeared in the French film "Happily Ever After" starring Johnny Depp, playing the character "Zoe". In the Jesper Ganslandt-produced film "Blondie" (2012), Gynning played the leading role alongside Marie Göranzon, Helena af Sandeberg and Alexandra Dahlström.
"I huvudet på Gynning".
On 8 February 2008 Gynning released her first music single, "Allt jag tar på blir till guld" ("Everything I touch turns to gold"). In her first television show "I huvudet på Gynning", the viewing audience got to see her working on the music video for the song. In the show Gynning created the perfume "Perfect", and launched a commercial for it. In the last episode it was revealed that her perfume would sell in stores. In September 2009, Gynning released her new scent "Go Girl!", becoming the first Swedish woman to have her own perfume and scent.
As a writer.
In 2005, Gynning released her autobiography, "Ego Girl", in which she describes how she was discovered as a model at age sixteen and lost herself in a world of sex and drugs before finding herself again. In 2007, mail correspondence between Gynning and Alex Schulman was released as a book.
At the end of 2008 Gynning, together with writer Ingrid Carlqvist, wrote the book "Ego Woman", a follow-up to "Ego Girl". The book was released by the company Tivoli in 2009.
In 2011, she debuted as a book author herself with the book "Laura – flickan från havet" (Laura - girl from the sea"), released by Bladh. She got the idea for the book after meeting with author Jens Lapidus. Gynning stated that she wanted to write a book about women who live around Stureplan in Stockholm. She has described the book as a "dirty crime" book. In 2012, the continuation book, "Vanessa – flickan i glaskupan" ("Vanessa - the girl in the glass dome"), was released.
As an artist.
Gynning has had several exhibitions of her artwork.
 In April 2009, she hosted a vernissage at Ystad Saltsjöbad. The exhibition was well-received and 15 pieces were sold for between kr1 and 2 million, according to Gynning. Two of the prominent pieces were named "Bleeding Barbie" and "Cat Power". She has also worked with glass and designed a glass collection for the Cervera () chain of Swedish homeware stores. She had an art exhibition at Gothia Towers on 21 November 2013, along with her mother Agneta Gynning.
She has recently opened an art studio with her mother under the name "Studio Gynning", and has been planning a celebration to mark her ten years anniversary as a professional artist. She is also a jewelry designer. She has also revealed in a newspaper interview that motherhood has affected her art. Her paintings, she has said, are not as dark now as previously, and although in the past she drew mainly portraits, she now paints the whole body. She attributes this to her having become a mother and to her sense that she is now a more complete person.
Awards.
Gynning won Swedish tabloid "Aftonbladet's" TV-award in 2007 for Best Female Television Personality of the Year.
In 2008, "Aftonbladet" listed Gynning amongst the most powerful people in Sweden, placing her at number 37.
Removal of silicon implants.
In January 2007, Gynning declared to the media that she would remove and sell her breast implants, as she wished to downsize her breasts. In early February 2007, she underwent surgery to remove the implants and Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin took photos of them. The implants were placed in a plexiglass box and sold on the auction site eBay; revenues from the sale were given to a charity that works with victims of the war in Rwanda.
Personal life.
Gynning comes from a very artistic family. She is the daughter of Agneta Gynning, an artist, and her grandfather's brother was the well-known artist and textile artist Lars Gynning, who studied under Isaac Grünewald.
In 2013, Gynning and her mother opened an art gallery in Malmö.
Gynning lived with Alexander Lydecker, a sales manager. The couple have two daughters, Alicia, born in 2012 and Adele, born in 2014, and lived in a suburb of Stockholm near the coast.


Brittany Evans

Brittany Evans (born August 29, 1975 in Huntington Beach, California) is an American model. She was voted "Miss Venus Swimwear International 2001" at the 2000 Venus Model Search, held by Venus Swimwear from 1989 to 2004. "Playboy" chose her to be Cyber Girl of the Week for the 1st week of June 2002, and subsequently became "Miss October" for Playboy.com in 2002. Evans went on to become a TV personality, hosting the popular TV series "Wild on E!". She later became the first female Spokesperson and In-Arena host of the NHL Coyotes in 2003/2004. In 2006, Brittany toured the country as the national St Pauli Girl. Barbasol shaving cream selected her to play a German vixen in their national commercial campaign in 2007. In 2008, she was voted #2 on "E" Entertainment's "20 Hottest Women on the Web". She appeared in the movie "Deep in the Valley" with Denise Richards and Scott Caan in 2011.


Sjaak Swart

Jesaia Swart (born 3 July 1938), commonly known as Sjaak Swart, is a Dutch former professional footballer who played as a winger for Ajax. During his career at Ajax, he amassed a total of almost 600 matches, a record for the club.
Biography.
Swart is Jewish and was born in Muiderberg, a fishing village about 20 kilometers east of Amsterdam. His Jewish fisherman father sold herring at the market. As a child, he and his father concealed themselves as non-Jews during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands from 1940 to 1945, hiding from Germans and Dutch colluders, who rounded up any Jews; nearly 75 per cent of the Dutch Jewish population was killed in those years.
Nicknamed "Mr. Ajax", he played for Ajax a total of almost 600 matches, a record for the club, starting in 1956. He was part of their European Cup victories in 1971, 1972, 1973.
For the Netherlands national team, Swart earned 31 caps, scoring ten goals.
Honours.
Ajax


Myo Ko Ko San

Myo Ko Ko San (; born 1 September 1994) is a Burmese transgender model, LGBT rights activist and beauty pageant titleholder who was elected Miss International Queen Myanmar 2014 and represented Myanmar at the Miss International Queen 2014. On 19 June 2018, she won the ASEAN - LGBT Community Pride Awards 2018.
Early life and education.
Myo Ko Ko San was born on 1 September 1994 in Mandalay, Myanmar, as a boy. She is the second child among three siblings, having a younger brother and an older brother. She experienced gender dysphoria beginning in early childhood, and began her gender transition at the age of 15 while attending school. She completed her sex reassignment surgery in Thailand at the age of 23. She studied civil engineering at Technological University, Mandalay.
Pageantry.
Miss Rainbow Ribbon 2013.
In 2013, she competed in Miss Rainbow Ribbon 2013, a pageant for transgender women which was held on 23 October 2013 at the Hotel Mandalay by Rainbow Ribbon Network Myanmar. After winning the event, she was elected to represent Myanmar for Miss International Queen 2014, the world's largest beauty pageant for transgender women.
Miss International Queen 2014.
She represented Myanmar at the Miss International Queen 2014 pageant which was held on 7 November 2014 in Pattaya, Thailand, along with participants from 20 other nations. She was the 1st runner-up for Talent.
Career.
After previously competing in the Miss International Queen 2014 pageant, she was recognized as Miss International Queen Myanmar, and became a transgender supermodel and actress.
Myo is set to be in the first Burmese transgender film. The film, currently untitled, will portray a transgender person who stands up for her rights even to the point of death.
Arrest under section 66 (d).
Myo Ko Ko San was sued under section 66 (d) of the telecommunications law by actress Wutt Hmone Shwe Yi, who filed a lawsuit against Myo for defamation, accusing Myo of being the administrator of Cele Cele Small, a Facebook page which posted allegedly defamatory material towards the actress. Cele Cele Small was a Facebook page with over 1 million likes that reveals inside information on the private lives of Myanmar’s celebrities and artists. Police took the model into custody at Yangon International Airport on her return from a visit to Bangkok, Thailand, and she was held at the Yankin Township Police Station on 17 January 2017.
Aftermath.
In Yankin Township Court, Myo Ko Ko San denied involvement with the Facebook group and questioned why the police had the right to arrest her without strong evidence. After four days in jail, Myo Ko Ko San was released and the defamation case against her was declared spurious as investigating officers found insufficient evidence to support the lawsuit.
LGBT activism.
Myo is an icon of Myanmar LGBTs and an advocate for LGBT rights in Myanmar. She has appeared in many campaigns for LGBT rights activism. Myo’s hope is that she can help educate people to learn more about LGBT issues and bring them towards a higher understanding.


Angela Saunders

Angela Saunders (born May 1977 in Bromley, London) is an English model and actress.
Early life.
Saunders trained as a youth in tap dance and ballet. She then became a hospital worker who did part-time modelling work, and after appearing as a nurse in the Scottish soap opera "McCallum", aged 21 she became a dancer on a cruise ship.
On her return to the UK, she became a full-time model and then grid-girl for three years in Formula One. She also had a job on Ant and Dec's children's show, "SMTV Live".
Acting career.
In 2002, Saunders got the part of Tash Parker on Sky One's "Dream Team" football soap opera. While undertaking the part, ITV1 asked her to audition for the similar "Footballers Wives" – first for the role of Chardonnay, and then a blonde named Cheryl. ITV scrapped the idea because the character was allegedly too much like Sheryl Gascoigne.
Personal life.
Although previously she did not take much interest in football, in 2003 Saunders married then Birmingham City footballer Stephen Clemence. The couple have two children, Jack and Sadie, Jack born on 5 February 2005 and Sadie on 20 April 2007. The couple have since divorced. Angela is now remarried to Dean Harrison.


Laure (art model)

Laure was an art model in France known for her work with artist Édouard Manet. She is best known for posing as the black maid offering the white nude figure a bouquet of flowers in Manet's 1863 painting "Olympia".
Art modeling.
Laure has been described as African or Caribbean, her last name is unknown. Art historian Griselda Pollock suggested that she met the artist Édouard Manet while working as a nursemaid in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. Manet's notebook, included in the 2019 exhibition "Le Modèle noir, de Géricault à Matisse" at the musee d'Orsay in Paris, recorded her address at 11, rue de Vintimille in Paris.
Laure also appeared in Manet's painting "Children in the Tuileries Garden (1861-62)". In both "Olympia" and "Children in the Tuileries Garden" paintings she is wearing the same outfit of a pink dress with a high white collar and a madras headtie. It is not known whether she was ever painted by other artists during that period.
Contemporary depictions.
Elizabeth Colomba's 2018 painting "Laure (Portrait of a Negresse)" depicts Laure on her way to Manet's studio. Colomba's painting was included in the exhibition "Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today", alongside Manet's paintings of Laure, at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University


Laura Dundovic

Laura Dundovic (born 16 September 1987 in Sydney, Australia) is an Australian actress, model and beauty pageant titleholder who won Miss Universe Australia 2008 and represented Australia in the Miss Universe 2008 competition, in which she placed in the top 10. She also took part in the Australian version of "I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here".
Dundovic supports the Western Sydney Wanderers in the A-League and supported Sydney United, club founded by Australian Croats; her brother played youth football for Northern Spirit.


Ryan Idol

Ryan Idol (born August 10, 1964) is an American gay pornographic film actor who performed in the 1990s and later onstage in mainstream theater. He has French, Irish, and Native American ancestry. Idol describes himself as "the creation of Marc Anthony Donais."
Biography.
Idol was raised in a series of foster homes as a child. He never knew his father, and had little contact with his mother while growing up.
After high school, Idol spent a brief period in the United States Navy, then worked as a construction worker. To generate income, he began stripping for women in nightclubs in New England. He was approached to do a nude layout for "Playgirl", and in February 1989 appeared as the "Man of the Month" centerfold under his birth name Marc Anthony Donais. This appearance launched his career in the adult film industry, in which he achieved notoriety and success under the name Ryan Idol. At the height of his career, he claimed to earn $50,000 per film, and made tens of thousands of dollars more stripping at gay clubs around the United States. He also engaged in a limited amount of prostitution. He retired from adult films in 1996.
On March 20, 1998, Idol was seriously injured after jumping through a window of his fourth-floor apartment in New York City in an attempted suicide. He considers the fall to be a "near-death experience". Idol has stated that he doesn't recall jumping but that "the drugs and alcohol took over".
Moving into theater acting, in 1999, Idol starred in the play "Making Porn". Idol next played "Bill Tom" in the play "Scent of Rain" (subtitled "Scent of Rain: A Love Story Really!"), a play written by Mark Dunn, for which he was lauded for "continu[ing] to establish himself as a capable actor". Idol made his Broadway debut when he played the "Crisco Patron" in the Roundabout Theater Company's 2007 revival of Terrence McNally's "The Ritz".
Regarding his sexuality, Idol stated, "I don't like to label myself... I'd just like to say I'm a loving person. I can love a man and I can love a woman."
Legal charges.
Court documents related to a lawsuit filed by HealthSouth over allegations of misuse of funds donated to Birmingham, Alabama, mayor Larry Langford's Computer Help for Kids charity mentioned Idol under his real name. The papers showed that $30,000 was paid to Idol, with $5,000 coming from the charity and $25,000 from the Council of Cooperating Governments. Charity director John Katopodis testified in a deposition that Idol was paid to repair computers and to set up computer giveaway programs in other areas. Idol testified that, because of his 1998 fall, he was "not at [his] full faculties" and could not recall the details of his time with the organization.
A Sacramento Superior Court jury convicted Idol on September 20, 2011, of attempted murder for smashing his girlfriend over the head with a toilet tank lid. He was also convicted of battery, assault with a deadly weapon and "corporal injury on a spouse or cohabitant". Sentencing was scheduled for December 9, 2011; however when he appeared, his attorney requested to withdraw from the case. The request was granted. Idol then appeared in court on January 13, 2012, requesting a retrial "citing ineffective assistance of counsel". He was sentenced to 12 years in state prison September 27, 2012. He is housed at the California inmate Medical Facility (CMF)in Vacaville, California, a medical facility for mentally ill prisoners, due to bad behavior, fighting, and drugs. Marc Anthony lost all his good time, and must complete his full sentence of 12 years. Due to his 3 strike record, he is eligible for a 25 years to life sentence if convicted for certain felonies, so he chose a deal to do his entire sentence instead of getting a new charge. his release date is August 2023 (protective custody).


Millie Bobby Brown

Millie Bobby Brown (born 19 February 2004) is a British actress, model and producer. At the age of twelve, she gained notability for her role as Jane "Eleven" Ives in the first season of the Netflix science fiction series "Stranger Things" (2016–present), which has been renewed for four seasons. For her portrayal as Eleven she has received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2016 and 2017 and two Screen Actors Guild Award nominations for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series in 2017 and 2018. Along with the main cast of "Stranger Things", she won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series in 2017.
Brown made her big screen debut with a lead role in the monster film (2019), a character she reprised in the sequel "Godzilla vs. Kong" (2021). She also starred in and produced the Netflix mystery film "Enola Holmes" (2020).
In 2018, Brown was featured in the "Time" 100 list of the world's most influential people. That year she was appointed as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, the youngest person selected for this position.
Early life.
Brown was born in Marbella, Málaga, Andalusia, Spain, the third of four children of English parents, Kelly and Robert Brown. She has British citizenship through her parents. The family moved to Bournemouth, Dorset, when she was around four years old.
Four years later, her family moved to the United States, settling in Windermere, Florida. She was born with partial hearing in one ear, and gradually lost all hearing in that ear over several years.
As of October 2017, Brown divides her time between London and Atlanta.
Acting career.
In 2013, Brown made her acting debut as a guest star in the ABC fantasy drama series "Once Upon a Time in Wonderland", a spin-off of "Once Upon a Time", portraying the role of Young Alice. In 2014, she had a starring role in the BBC America paranormal drama-thriller series "Intruders" as Madison O'Donnell. She made guest appearances in the CBS police procedural drama "NCIS", the ABC sitcom "Modern Family", and the ABC medical drama series "Grey's Anatomy".
In 2016, Brown was cast to play Eleven ('El') in the Netflix science fiction horror series "Stranger Things". She received critical praise and she was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series and the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. She won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series with her co-stars and won the 43rd Saturn Award for Best Performance by a Younger Actor in a Television Series. For her role as Eleven in the second season of "Stranger Things", she received her second Emmy nomination in 2018.
In November 2016, Brown starred in the music video for Sigma and Birdy's single "Find Me". Since November 2016, she has appeared in commercial advertisements for Citigroup.
In January 2017, she made her modelling debut in Calvin Klein's "By Appointment" campaign. The following month, she was signed to the agency IMG Models. She appeared in the campaign of the Italian brand "Moncler" in the summer of 2018.
In January 2018, Brown was cast to star in and produce the film adaptation of "The Enola Holmes Mysteries". She was also chosen to voice in Darren Aronofsky's virtual reality experience "". On 20 April 2018, she was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by "Time" magazine, becoming the youngest person to be included in the list. On 20 November 2018, it was announced that she had become the youngest person ever to be appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
In November 2018, EA Games announced that Brown collaborated with "The Sims 4" programmers to feature in the Sims 4 Positivity Challenge. She was named by "Time" magazine as one of the most influential teens of 2017 and of 2018. In 2018, "The Hollywood Reporter" ranked Brown as among Hollywood's top thirty stars under age eighteen.
Brown made her feature film debut in 2019, in "", the sequel to the 2014 film "Godzilla". She reprised her role in the next sequel, "Godzilla vs. Kong" (2021).
In March 2019, she became the ambassador of UEFA's Together #WePlayStrong campaign. That same month, it was announced Brown will be starring in the film adaptation of "The Thing About Jellyfish" by Ali Benjamin as Suzy.
On July 28, 2020, it was announced that she would star in and produce through her PCMA Productions a suspense film titled "The Girls I’ve Been". Brown will also star and executive produce fantasy film "Damsel" for Netflix, under the direction of Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo based on a screenplay by Dan Mazeau. In December 2020, it was announced that the Russo brothers will direct an adaptation of Simon Stålenhag's graphic novel "The Electric State" for Universal Pictures with Brown set to star as the lead. That December, it was reported that Netflix offered her a first look deal that included multiple projects.


Eve Lindley

Eve Lindley (born 1993) is an American actress. She is best known for her roles in the television series "Dispatches from Elsewhere" and the film "All We Had." In 2016, she was named in "Out" magazine's OUT100. As a model she has worked with Barneys New York.
Biography.
Eve Lindley was born January 12, 1993, to Brad Lindley, a New York pilot, and his then wife. Before Eve, who is a trans woman, the family had two daughters, Lucia Curley and Darah. Eve's parents divorced when she was two. In an interview with "The Window", Lindley said: "In some families only one parent approves of a child's gender switch. In my case, my birth mother didn't go for it."
Lindley received all the moral support from her father, who had given her Barbie dolls in her early days and even built her a dollhouse. After her father's custody of Eve was resolved, he moved the family to "an environment where no one questioned Eve's sex-change decision."
Lindley is best known for starring in the AMC series "Dispatches from Elsewhere" as Simone, a trans woman looking for a way out of her isolation. Lindley is also Latina; one of her parents is Cuban.


Kent Karlsen

Kent Ingar Karlsen (born 17 February 1973) is a retired Norwegian footballer and football agent.
Hailing from Sørum, Karlsen joined regional giants Lillestrøm to play on the highest tier in Norway. In the latter half of 1998 he was loaned to HamKam, and the move was made permanent for HamKam's 1995 Tippeligaen campaign. Ahead of the 1996 season he joined Vålerenga, winning the 1997 Norwegian Football Cup Final.
In the latter half of 1998 he was loaned to Ikast FS in Denmark, managed by Norwegian Even Pellerud, then to FK Haugesund from March to August 2000. After the 2000 season concluded, Karlsen went to England and Luton Town F.C.. He made his debut on 4 November 2000 against Bury, and played his last game on 5 May 2001 against Port Vale. After a period without playing he signed for second-tier club Åsane in Bergen, In 2003 he went on to FK Tønsberg, retiring after the 2004 season and settling in a house in Eik. He started working as a player agent.


Ahmo Hight

Ahmo Kathleen Hight (born September 18, 1973) is an American fitness model, swimsuit model and actress. She first rose to prominence in winning the Ms. Fitness USA (Western States Division) tournament and Ms. Fit Body Bay Area in 1994, after which she began modeling for fitness and muscle magazines. In 1997, she launched an acting career (sometimes using the name Amy Hite) and appeared in several made-for-video and made-for cable films, mostly of softcore porn genre. She also appeared in videos produced by "Playboy" magazine. She appeared opposite Anna Nicole Smith in the faux documentary "Anna Nicole Smith Exposed", as well as episodes of the television series "Pacific Blue" and "Hotel Exotica".
Reality television.
Real Chance of Love.
Hight was a contestant on the VH1 reality series "Real Chance of Love", where brothers Ahmad "Real" Givens and Kamal "Chance" Givens have seventeen women competing for their love in two separate groups: "Real Girls" and "Chance Girls". Hight appeared on the show under the nickname of "Milf." On the show, which premiered October 20, 2008, Hight stated that she was 35 years old and had a 9-year-old son. Hight was in the top three for the "Real Girls" but was eliminated on Episode 10 of the eleven competitive episodes. She appeared in a total of twelve of the fourteen episodes.
I Love Money.
In early 2009, Hight appeared on the second season of the VH1 reality series "I Love Money" and was eliminated in the fifth episode, leaving her in fourteenth place. She appeared on six of the fifteen episodes.
Personal life.
Hight has a son. On March 26, 2015, she was charged with second degree assault and domestic assault, after stabbing a man with a pair of scissors in Watertown, Minnesota.


Camila Vezzoso

Camila Vezzoso is a model from Uruguay and a beauty queen titleholder who was crowned Miss Uruguay 2012. She also represented Uruguay in the 2012 Miss Universe pageant. Following the contests, she moved to Paris and is currently pursuing a modeling career.
Contests.
Elite Model Look 2010.
Camilla was a second runner-up at Elite Model Look 2010 in Uruguay.
Miss Uruguay 2012.
Camila Vezzoso was crowned Miss Universo Uruguay 2012 in Montevideo, Uruguay on Thursday, 31 May 2012.
Miss Universe 2012.
She went to Colombia and Venezuela for preparation in makeup, public speaking, and runway, representing Uruguay at Miss Universe 2012 held in December that year.
Miss United Continent 2013.
On 14 September 2013, Vezzoso participated in the Miss United Continent 2013 pageant in Guayaquil, Ecuador. She placed 3rd.


Kelly Bell

Kelly Bell (born 21 February 1982 in Aldershot) is an English former glamour model. Bell has been described as the United Kingdom's "number-one glamour model."
Bell has appeared in many young teen girl magazines, as a young teen model and has had many TV appearances over the last 15 years. Bell entered a competition to find Britain's next top model in the "Daily Sport" at just 16, placing first out of thousands of entrants.
Bell was voted the UK's sexiest woman for 2007 by the readers of the" Daily & Sunday Sport".
Bell recorded a single titled "Down 'n Dirty" in 2003 and performed a concert in Colchester in aid of the Army Benevolent Fund.
Bell is a vegan who avoids the consumption or use of animal products. Bell is a supporter of the British animal rights group Viva!.