 Orianne on the TV set of Philippe Labro's show | |
| Personal information | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 24, 1978 Clamart, France |
| Nationality | French |
Orianne Aymard (born December 24, 1978) is an author, speaker, and mountaineer from Clamart, France. She lives in Chamonix.
| Orianne on the TV set of Philippe Labro's show | |
| Personal information | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 24, 1978 Clamart, France |
| Nationality | French |
Orianne Aymard (born December 24, 1978) is an author, speaker, and mountaineer from Clamart, France. She lives in Chamonix.
Orianne Aymard was born on December 24, 1978, in Clamart, France, and spent her childhood and adolescence in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, near Paris. After studying biology and environmental science at the University of Paris-Saclay, and then at the University of Western Brittany, she earned a Master of Science in social policy from the London School of Economics in 2002. She continued there with a Ph.D. focusing on social policy in Tibet.
At 25 years old, following a cerebral hemorrhage in 2004 in northern India, near the samādhi (tomb) of Anandamayi Ma in Kankhal, at the foot of the Himalayas, she redirected her studies. In 2008, she obtained a PhD in religious studies from the Université du Québec à Montréal, jointly with Concordia University and Université Laval, with a thesis on Hinduism on the postmortem worship of saints in Hindu tradition. In 2014, she published a book inspired by her thesis work titled When a Goddess Dies [1] [2] [3] [4] with Oxford University Press in New York, which focuses on the worship of Mā Ānandamayī after her death (mahāsamādhi).
During her studies in marine biology, she joined various scientific research programs, notably at the Ocean Park Conservation Foundation Hong Kong, the Texas A&M University Marine Mammal Research Program, Opération Cétacés in New Caledonia, the Instituto del Mar del Peru in Callao, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Hobart, the National University of Costa Rica, and UNESCO in Jakarta.
From 2005 to 2007, she taught in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) and was a research associate at the Institute for Feminist Research Studies (IREF). In 2012-2013, she was a visiting scholar at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University in New York, and a research associate at Harvard University's Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. From 2019 to 2021, she was a member of the Center for Studies and Research on South Asia, and collaborated with the World Religions and Spirituality Project. Concurrently, she was an executive fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. [5]
From 2008 to 2011, she joined the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. After a mission in Burundi, in Gitega, where she promoted international humanitarian law to the military and visited detention sites, she was sent to Haiti just after the 2010 earthquake. There, she was responsible for the restoration of family links, [6] [7] and later in charge of areas controlled by gangs in Port-au-Prince, such as Cité Soleil, Martissant, [8] and Bel Air, during the cholera epidemic and electoral violence. She would not return to Haiti until many years later, as an electoral observer with the Organization of American States. [9]
From 2014 to 2018, after two years in the United States, she joined the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, where she was primarily responsible for religious issues and violent extremism during the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks.
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From a young age, Aymard was attracted to the Himalayan heights and long-distance walking. At 19, she completed the 1700km Camino de Santiago from Le Puy-en-Velay to the Cape Finisterre, a pilgrimage she undertook again five years later starting from the Tour Saint-Jacques in Paris (2300km). She also crossed the entire range of the Pyrenees (GR 10) and the Alps (GR 5), and undertook numerous long walks around the world, including in Tasmania, South America, Nepal, and Tibet.
Despite the high-altitude contraindications linked to her cerebral hemorrhage in 2004, she returned to the Himalayas to climb high peaks. In 2019, she climbed Lhotse (8,516 m). [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] A book was drawn from her ascent titled Sous l'œil de la Déesse (Under the Eye of the Goddess) with Mont-Blanc Editions (2022), directed by Catherine Destivelle, where she discusses the difficulty of being a woman in a very masculine environment. [15] [16] [17] [18] [19]
In 2023, she embarked on an assault of Mount Everest. During the expedition, she was caught in a serac fall in the Khumbu Icefall. Severely injured, she had to be urgently evacuated. [20] After a stay in a hospital in Kathmandu, she continued her ascent, reaching the summit of Everest (8,848 m) on May 17, 2023. [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] Despite frostbite on her fingers and a foot fracture that occurred during the descent at the Yellow Band at 7,700 m, she managed to descend. [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] Her journey is the subject of a documentary film with TV8 Mont-Blanc, Injam Production, and Capitello Group. She also wrote another book Au cœur de l’Everest: la quête d’une femme au sommet (To the Heart of Everest : A Woman’s Journey to the Summit), published by Mareuil Editions [33] . In this book, she shares her inner journey, her connection to the sacred, and her reflections on resilience, particularly in the face of the extreme risks associated with high-altitude. [34] The narrative also aims to dismantle clichés and misconceptions about climbing Everest, revealing a reality far removed from the images often portrayed. [35]
Orianne is a member of The Explorers Club.
She is now a keynote speaker and gives lectures in the corporate world and at business and management schools. She mainly speaks on themes such as leadership, resilience, self-surpassing, and crisis management.
A graduate of the Co-Active Coaching Institute (CTI) in California, she is also a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC).
She is featured in the documentary film (52 mn) "Everest, the Mother Goddess" directed by David Vital-Durand, which tells her story and her ascent of Everest in 2023, with Injam Production, TV8 Mont-Blanc, and Capitello Group (released in September 2024).
She also appears in other documentaries, such as “Everest en partage”, by Théo Livet, based on an original idea by the "Everest Sprinter", Marc Batard, where she specifically discusses her accident in the Khumbu Icefall.
Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in the Alps and Western Europe, and the highest mountain in Europe outside the Caucasus Mountains, rising 4,805.59 m (15,766 ft) above sea level, located on the Franco-Italian border. It is the second-most prominent mountain in Europe, after Mount Elbrus, and the 11th most prominent mountain in the world.
Iván Vallejo is a high-altitude mountaineer from Ecuador. On 1 May 2008, he became the 14th person to reach the summit of all 14 mountains above 8,000 meters, and the 7th without use of supplemental oxygen. He is the first, and still the only, Southern Hemisphere climber to complete all 14 eight-thousanders, without supplemental oxygen.
Kílian Jornet is a Spanish professional long-distance trail runner and ski mountaineer. Jornet has won some of the most prestigious ultramarathons, including the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc multiple times, Grand Raid, Western States and Hardrock.
Jules Jacot-Guillarmod was a Swiss physician, mountaineer and photographer. He was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1868 and died in the Gulf of Aden in 1925. As a mountaineer he was known for his ascents in the Swiss Alps but particularly for his participation in two Himalaya expeditions.
Vera Michalski-Hoffmann is a Swiss billionaire businesswoman, significant shareholder in Roche Holding and publisher. She is the president of several publishing houses in Switzerland, France and Poland, grouped together in a holding company, Libella SA, based in Lausanne. She founded the Jan Michalski Foundation in Montricher, that awards the annual Jan Michalski Prize in literature.
Nicolas Jaeger was a French physician, alpinist, and ski mountaineer.
Edita Horrell, previously known as Edita Nichols, is a Lithuanian-born mountaineer and humanitarian aid worker. She became the first Lithuanian woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, on 22 May 2013.
Flutura Ibrahimi better known as Uta Ibrahimi is an Albanian alpinist from Kosovo.
Élisabeth Revol is a French mountaineer. In January 2018, Revol became the first woman to climb Nanga Parbat in winter; on the descent, she was rescued, while her teammate Tomasz Mackiewicz died, an event which was widely covered by the mainstream press. Having narrowly avoided amputation of her left foot, she traversed Mount Everest and Lhotse consecutively in May 2019.
Monique Richard is a Canadian mountaineer.
The Prix Iris for Best Casting is an annual film award, presented by Québec Cinéma as part of its Prix Iris awards program, to honour the year's best casting in films made within the Cinema of Quebec.
Goddess of the Fireflies is a Canadian drama film, directed by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette and released in 2020. An adaptation of the novel by Geneviève Pettersen, the film centres on the coming of age of Catherine, a teenage girl living in a small town in Quebec in the early 1990s.
Kelly Depeault is a Canadian actress from Sherbrooke, Quebec.
Joseph Vallot was a French scientist, astronomer, botanist, geographer, cartographer and alpinist and "one of the founding fathers of scientific research on Mont Blanc". He is known mainly for his fascination with Mont Blanc and his work in funding and constructing a high-altitude observatory below its summit, and for the many years of study and research work that he and his wife conducted both there, and at their base in Chamonix. The observatory and adjacent refuge that he constructed for use by mountain guides and their clients attempting the Mont Blanc summit both still bear his name today, despite being rebuilt in modern times.
Fahad Abdulrahman Badar (born 1979) is a Qatari banker & mountaineer. He is the first Arab to summit Mount Everest and Lhotse, in a single expedition.
Ingrid M. Baeyens is a Belgian mountaineer and physical therapist. She became the first woman to summit the South Face of Annapurna in 1991, and the first Belgian woman to summit Mount Everest in 1992.
Nicole Catherine Isabelle Niquille is a Swiss mountain guide, mountaineer and humanitarian. She is the first Swiss woman to become a certified mountain guide and the first woman to reach over 8,000m without supplementary oxygen.
Bouchra Baibanou is a Moroccan alpinist and motivational speaker. She is the first Moroccan woman to summit Mount Everest, and in 2017 she became the first Moroccan to complete the Seven Summits.
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