Jean-Pierre Isbouts
AUTHOR

Jean-Pierre Isbouts

Religion & Spirituality | Biographies & Memoirs
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Jean-Pierre Isbouts is a historian, bestselling National Geographic author, and award-winning screenwriter and film director. A humanities scholar, his research has been devoted to biblical archaeology, Renaissance Florence, and 19th century Europe. He also serves as doctoral professor in the Social Sciences PhD program of Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, CA. His website is www.jpisbouts.org. To contact the author for an interview, or to request his appearance at your event, please send an email to Catherine Labrador at clabrador@pantheonTV.com. PERSONAL Jean-Pierre is a full-time historian, author, filmmaker, and doctoral professor at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara (www.fielding.edu). In his spare time (or what's left of it), he likes to discover new places in Asia and the Middle East with his wife Cathie, a production executive. The father of four children, and grandfather of four beautiful boys (with a fifth of the way), he and Cathie live in Santa Monica with Katie, a highly opinionated Labrador Retriever. BIOGRAPHY Jean-Pierre was born in Eindhoven, Holland and studied Attic Greek and Latin before continuing in archaeology, art history and musicology at Leyden University. He completed his doctoral research on the 19th century architectural firm of Carrère & Hastings at Columbia University in New York. He then joined the American Council for the Arts (ACA) in New York City, active in a number of Federally funded arts programs. ​ ​In the 1990's, he founded the ArtSpace studio in Los Angeles, a unit of American Interactive Media, and produced a number of programs on Renaissance and 19th century art as part of the Great Art Series; many of these were subsequently translated in seven languages. He later served as Managing Director of Philips Interactive Media Europe, a joint venture with Polygram, from its head offices in London, UK. ​As a musicologist, Dr. Isbouts has produced recordings of Bach, Corelli, Handel, Tchaikovsky, Satie, Franck and Debussy with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, and other soloists and ensembles.​ An award-winning filmmaker, Jean-Pierre has produced programs featuring Leonard Nimoy, Charlton Heston, Sir David Frost, Dick van Dyke, and Morgan Freeman, working with Hollywood studios such as Disney, Castle Rock Entertainment, Hallmark and Agamemnon Studios. His TV programs have been broadcast on ABC, A&E, CNBC, History Channel, Hallmark Channel and PBS stations, as well as scores of television networks in Europe and Asia. He also produced an acclaimed interactive game based on Kenneth Branagh's four-hour epic motion picture "Hamlet," which was distributed around the world. Dr. Isbouts served as the Editor-in-Chief of two multimedia encyclopedias, Bertelsmann’s Lexikon and Standaard’s Encyclopedie. ​His first book, "Charlton Heston's Hollywood," was published in 1998. Based on many hours of interviews with Charlton Heston, the book chronicles the astonishing transformation of post-war American cinema through the eyes of the only actor whose career spanned from Cecil B. DeMille to James Cameron. ​In 2007, National Geographic Books published his first major work of biblical history, "The Biblical World," which became a worldwide bestseller, and the first of several books for National Geographic Society. The success of "Biblical World" was followed by the 2012 publication of "In the Footsteps of Jesus", a fresh reconstruction of the world of Jesus, using the latest insights from biblical archaeology, market economics and forensic sociology. "Footsteps" sold over a 100,000 copies in the first 8 weeks of release--an unprecedented record for a large hard-cover book at a $40 price point. ​In 2013, Jean-Pierre wrote his in-depth study of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa ("The Mona Lisa Myth"), written with Dr. Christopher Brown, published in November of 2013. Also in November of 2013, National Geographic Books published Jean-Pierre's "Who's Who in the Bible," a major reference work comprising over 2,000 men and women in the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament. Since then, his series on biblical history was expanded with "The Story of Christianity" (2014) and "The Archaeology of the Bible" (2016), both for National Geographic. Also in 2016, Random House published his book "Ten Prayers that Changed the World," which won the "Best Spirituality Book of 2016" award. In 2017, St. Martin's Press published his provocative new book about Leonardo da Vinci, "Young Leonardo," which offers a radically new reconstruction of Leonardo's early career. The book, which reveals that Leonardo painted a second version of the Last Supper, on canvas, for the French King Louis XII, is currently being produced as a motion picture. Jean-Pierre is represented by Global Lion Intellectual Property Management, a literary agency based in New York, Los Angeles and Florida.
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