Samia Orosemane

Samia Orosemane, born Samia Tamansourt on 9 June 1980 in Paris, is a French humorist and comedian of Tunisian origin. She became known in 2009 with her show Samia et les 40 comiques, which featured the participation of other artists. She was born in Paris and grew up in Clichy-sous-Bois, in the Paris region. She fell in love with theatre at secondary school through the study of works by Moliere, which prompted her to become a comedian. She studied theatre and, after obtaining her baccalaureat, entered the Conservatoire d'art dramatique de Paris, which she preferred over her studies in sociology and political science. She stayed there two years before being rejected for lack of attendance, as she was working in a factory at the same time to pay for her studies.

She married a Martinican convert to Islam whom she met in a theatrical workshop. She gave up the stage, assuming that the veil, which she decided to wear at the age of 21, would deprive her of artistic opportunities, and began working as a nanny. Nevertheless, her passion for theatre pushed her to resume the search for new talents for the show Samia et les 40 comiques, which she put together in 2009. Since then she has performed alone on stage with her show Femmes de couleurs, wearing a turban and a turtleneck along with colourful costumes. In her first show she introduced new talented artists as well as established humorists such as Booder, Charlotte Gabris, Les Lascars gays, Candiie, Malik Bentalha, Shirley, Mamane, Kamel le Magicien and Kyan Khojandi, and also Baptiste Lecaplain and Verino. She was one of the revelations of the gala Les Impertinentes 2014, and was part of Vanity Fair's December 2017 ranking of the 50 most influential French people in the world.

She created her YouTube channel where extracts of her sketches can be found. One of her videos went viral: following the attacks in Ottawa, she asked Islamists, fundamentalists and jihadists to stop hiding behind Islam, and the video was shared at the time of the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks and picked up by media such as BFM TV. She also posts a weekly video Tele Aicha and made a series of videos Genevieve et Aicha. In August 2014 she organized the first festival du rire on the island of Djerba, the island her parents come from; the first edition was a great success, but the second had to be cancelled because of the state of emergency declared in Tunisia after the attack on the Bardo museum. In 2018 she published the book Femme de couleurs with First Editions.