Le MEETUP was born in Paris in 2024 from a desire to make space for thinking together beyond the usual scripts of classrooms, galleries, parties, or bars. What began as an experiment among friends became a recurring program, changing form each time while holding onto the same urgency: to rethink the way we gather.
We begin with a question without the pretense of answering it. We consider objects from culture and let them open cracks in us. Le MEETUP is not a class, not a performance, not a night out. It is people in a room trying to speak honestly, awkwardly, urgently. Sometimes it is brilliant. Sometimes it is messy. That is the point.
We meet in places heavy with history, where bodies have been counted, silenced, and called to order. We enter to disturb that silence and hear what conversation can sound like when it is no longer afraid of itself. Politics, intimacy, and culture are currents that pass through us every time we say “I” or “you.” Conversation is work. Listening is part of that work.
Le MEETUP is an experiment, different and fragile each time. What takes shape emerges through bodies, voices, and shared rhythms. It continues to work on us after we leave the room.
You chose to be here. That choice is the foundation of everything. Being present means introducing yourself to a stranger, sitting with discomfort rather than retreating from it, and contributing to what happens in the room. Le MEETUP doesn't happen to you. It happens because of you.
Exchange only becomes meaningful when something is at stake. Small groups, unexpected formats, and activities approach a question from angles you might not have chosen yourself. Something passes between people: an idea, a disagreement, a way of seeing something differently. You leave having given something and taken something. That transfer is the point.
Many of us have learned to wait for our turn to speak rather than listen. At Le MEETUP, listening is not passive. It is part of the work. We practice horizontal communication: no speakers, no panels, no stages. The floor belongs to everyone, which also means paying attention to who takes up space, who doesn't, and when to give it.
Every meetup starts the same way
Michael Valinsky
President & Creative Director
Michael is a Paris-based French-American writer and cultural organizer. He founded Le MEETUP in 2024 as an ongoing inquiry into how language, bodies, and lived experience shape collective life. Growing up between Paris and New York, Michael has always been attuned to how space, displacement, and identity cohere. Language, for him, is material and method at once: it organizes attention, distributes power, and determines who becomes legible, audible, or welcome in a given space. His training is shaped by psychoanalysis, queer theory, and close reading. At New York University, he argued that words carry physical force before they carry meaning. At the London School of Economics, he examined how three writers represented the AIDS crisis in their work, and how their books shaped what it meant to become a gay man after them, and who got left out of that story. He treats theory as a tool for attunement, sharpening perception and complicating certainty. Le MEETUP structures gatherings that favor slowness over efficiency, intimacy over scale, participation over spectacle, an extension of the same instinct that shaped his relationship to language: attention built collectively, tested in real time, with people who did not arrive with a shared vocabulary.
Marcus Hudson
Programming Coordinator
Marcus was born and raised in Rochester, a Midwestern American city whose influence extends far beyond its size. Growing up an only child in a family rooted in care, planning, and movement, he developed an early sensitivity to people, systems, and the spaces between them. Surrounded by science and international visitors, his curiosity turned outward, less interested in belonging neatly than in understanding how different worlds touch. His encounter with the French language in high school became a turning point, evolving from study into a means of self-repositioning. After degrees in French, English as a foreign language, and education, he began teaching languages in Minnesota and then Brisbane, Australia before arriving in France in 2009, where he then taught in La Rochelle and Tours. Wherever he has lived, his orientation has stayed the same: structure, transmission, and the quiet labor of bringing people together. In 2016, Marcus settled in Paris, moving from language transmission into global communications alongside senior leadership at major international brands. He continued building communities through sport, co-leading running groups and inclusive spaces within rugby. Marcus joined Le MEETUP at its second edition and went on to co-found the nonprofit association that has formally carried the project since its sixth edition. He has been co-creating its programming ever since, designing frameworks that privilege active listening over performance, and cohesion over consensus.
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