Our instructors at the Alliance Française

Yvonne Bade

Originally from Bordeaux, Yvonne is a longtime active member and volunteer at the Alliance Française de Seattle. After living for over thirty years in Tokyo, Japan, Yvonne returned to the United States with her husband and began teaching at the Alliance Française. She has taught both French and English to students of all ages. Today, she primarily focuses her attention on Joie de Vivre, a fun and relaxing French language class for seniors.

Florence Bangue-Tandet

Florence is a French native who relocated to Seattle from Toulouse five years ago with her family. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Sciences of Education from the University of Toulouse II. In France, she was working in elementary schools with kids ranging from 3 to 10. In Seattle, she has taught French to adults for almost two years.She is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Teaching at Seattle Pacific University. She is passionate about teaching, loves meeting new people and sharing her knowledge and experiences about her native country.

Alexa Berlow

Alexa is a native French speaker, fluent in French and American English (dual citizenship) with heritage from Southern France and the Mediterranean Region. She has been teaching French to children for 6 years, privately and in small groups. Alexa teaches children French with focus on conversation through games, art, singing, movement, and culture (creative writing, history, science for older children) with each class developed on the interests of the kids in the group. She has been facilitating childrens activites and enrichment programs since 2000 in before and after-school programs, special interest groups, and movement arts. She has taught teens and adult in private sessions as well. Her interests and experience arise from cross-cultural relations, language study and the arts, and her personal experiences. Alexa and family with one son, live in Seattle, where she also has her own holistic care service & practice.

Delphine Berniere

Delphine is a French native speaker who came from Paris with her family 3 years ago. She holds a degree in Marketing and worked for different companies in France. She taught French language to children, teenagers, adults in American schools and at the Alliance Francaise, privately and in small groups. Delphine loves sharing her knowledge and experiences about her country

Delia Bratosin

Delia holds a Master’s Degree in Francophone Literatures from Babes- Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Delia began her career teaching French and English as foreign languages in Romania. She later moved to Perpignan, France, for two years, where she taught English and Romanian. In teaching French, she brings her passion for French language and culture as well as her dedication and enthusiasm to working with students of all ages.

Perle Deutsch Shadpour

Perle grew up in Versailles, near Paris, and as an adult chose to travel and live in England, Ireland, and Israel before returning to the PNW. Perle holds dual Bachelor’s Degrees in Music Performance/Musicianship and English and double Master’s Degrees in American Studies and Teaching French as a Second Language. She taught classical guitar for 10 years and has been teaching French and English for 10 years both privately and at university level. Perle includes among former employers The National Office for the French Language and the Languages of France (DGLFLF) and the University of Washington, and she occasionally works as a translator-interpreter.
Perle loves the arts, horses, dogs - anything with fur - learning new languages, cooking and sharing her different cultures and languages with her students!

Sylvie Gaillard

Sylvie, a real Parisienne born and raised in Paris, moved to Seattle few years ago. After earning the “Diplome de professeur de l’Ecole Superieure d’Etudes Choregraphiques de Paris” and then the Diploma of the Royal Academy of Dancing in England, she taught for 20 years in the Conservatories of Paris and in San Diego where she lived for 2 years.
When she arrived in Seattle she was a volunteer at Highline Community College to teach French. She got excellent appreciations from her students and staff and then she started to be a French instructor. She had classes in several schools in the Puget Sound and at the Department of Army. Her focus is to make the language studies enjoyable, to give the means and desire to discover different cultures and way of thinking through communication. Between ballet and French language, her passion has always been the art of teaching.

Effie Janjic

Originally from Thessaloniki, Greece, Effie began French in a Greco-Français high school, and later graduated from the University of Thessaloniki in Langue et Littérature Françaises. She also had the chance to take literature and linguistics at the University of Tours in France under a scholarship from the French government. She came to live in Seattle eight years ago and started to teach French at the Alliance Française, bringing her love for French language and culture to students of all ages!

John Matthies

John, a Seattle native, holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages & Literature from the University of Washington. He has taught French grammar, literature & civilization at the university level for over a decade. All told, he has lived over three years in France, and taught in a suburban Paris lycée (2001-2002) to complete his doctoral research. His dissertation, “Fort Apache: The Literary Lives of the Parisian banlieue Savage,” describes the origin and transmission of France’s suburban “Cowboy” narrative from the Belle Époque down to the present day, and concludes with an examination of the “Redskin” themes developed in contemporary banlieue (suburban) fiction. His teaching and research interests include the 20th- and 21st-century literatures of the Francophone world and the Yiddish tradition.

Nicole Pennebaker

Nicole is a Seattle native who recently relocated back to the Pacific Northwest with her husband and daughter after spending 10 years in the sunny Southwest.  She has a Master’s degree in French from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Bachelor’s degree from the Evergreen State College.  Nicole has been teaching French for 12 years at various schools and colleges and was involved with the Albuquerque chapter of the Alliance Française, both as a teacher and a board member.   Nicole’s teaching style incorporates games, music and small group activities to create a comfortable atmosphere in the classroom and encourage student involvement and communication in the target language.   

Gwénoëlle Sauvage

Gwen grew up in the outskirts of Paris. She studied the Sciences at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris VI, in Paris. After receiving her engineering degree, she started working for France's largest automobile manufacturer, PSA Peugeot Citroën, in a very international context, first as an engineer and then as a project manager and manager. During the 15 years she spent at Citroën, she worked closely with people from all over the world, as partners, suppliers and competitors. Gwen was also exposed to teaching where she built partnerships with technical colleges in Paris in an effort to offer highly qualified interns the opportunity to practice their skills in a real-life professional environment.Gwen has extensive experience in the French business arena. She is knowledgeable in hiring processes, technical processes, protocol involving interviewing, presentations, and meetings. She has recently obtained a graduate degree in FLE (French as a Second Language) through CNED (National French Remote Education) classes with l'Alliance Française de Paris.

El-Hadji Sougou

El-Hadji is a native French speaker born in Senegal (West Africa). He holds an Economics degree from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a Master of Arts in Business from l’Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens. 
El-Hadji has taught French in a variety of settings, namely in the business arena where he gave lessons to Brazilian employees of L’Oréal-Brazil Headquarters in Rio de Janeiro.  In France, he tutored French and other subjects to students of all ages from different backgrounds in the suburbs of Paris.
El Hadji is enthusiastic to be part of the Alliance team of teachers and brings with him a fresh perspective from his well-traveled experiences into other cultures and is ready to share them with his students.

Aimie Shaw

Aimie grew up in eastern Canada and relocated to Seattle in 2010. She is currently completing her PhD in French literature at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. She has taught French in a variety of capacities, ranging from private tutoring to university classrooms as well as having spent a year teaching at a lycée in La Ciotat, France. She hopes to share with her students her enthusiasm for the diversity of the French language and the richness of its cultures."

Ali Taher

Ali was born in Djibouti, a small francophone country. He has been leaving in Seattle for 3 years. He attended Paul Valery University in Montpellier (France) and graduated in Modern Humanities and in Teaching French as a Second language. Later, Ali returned to his country to teach French literature and grammar in Middle and High schools for more than ten years. He was involved in several educational think-tanks on integrating the common values of La Francophonie in school curricula. Ali has a long experience in teaching French as a foreign language.

Andrea Taylor-Brochet

Andrea spent most of her life in Europe. She was educated in Geneva, Switzerland where she grew up with her Swiss-American family. Later, she attended Wesleyan University and Duke University in the United States where she obtained degrees in Psychology and French. After her studies, she moved to France and lived in the French Alps for 10 years. She was hired to teach English to  the Winter Olympics of 1992 Committee and in the process became an expert skiier.  She married and moved to Paris before settling in Chartres where she worked as a Human Resources consultant as well as a Language Coach for local Pharmaceutical companies. Andrea has been in Seattle since 2007 and lives with her French husband and three bilingual children. She now teaches French at Seattle Pacific University where she obtained a Master’s in TESOL. She has been an instructor with the Alliance Française since 2008, teaching adult conversation classes and loves  sharing her experience living, working and traveling all over the world with learners of French at all levels.

Nathalie Tomaszewski

Nathalie Tomaszewski was born in France and has been living in Seattle for several years. Her studies began at the Sorbonne where she studied French and German and later, pursued a Masters of Arts in French Studies from the University of Washington, with a specialty in 19th century French literature. Nathalie has been teaching adults and children for over 10 years in various schools and colleges. In addition to teaching, her interests also include acting and stage productions. She is actively involved with Playing French Seattle, a francophone theater group. Nathalie's teaching style focuses on facilitating dialogue, verbal expression and communication among students. "How to ask things" is as important as "how to answer." In her class, you will not only study French, you will discover a whole different culture through texts, movies, music, and food.

Ivette Valdés

Originally from Havana, Cuba, Ivette holds a BA from Princeton University in French Culture and Civilization as well as an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in French Literature. While living in France, she taught English at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. Ivette has also taught French in Lugano, Switzerland. Ivette's more than fifteen years of teaching experience embraces all age groups in a variety of traditional and nontraditional settings. Before joining the Alliance Française de Seattle three years ago, she taught French and Spanish at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska. Ivette's teaching interests include grammar and composition, French cinema and Francophone literature. She has a deep passion for the history and writings of the French Caribbean. Ivette's literature classes at the Alliance have covered a wide range of topics including African women writers, literature and gastronomy, French theater from Molière to Ionesco, history and literature in the French Caribbean and literature & immigration in France.

Claire Wagenseil

Born in Seattle, Claire earned her B.A. in English & French Literature from Stanford University in 2006. She fell in love with the city of Paris and the French language while participating in Stanford’s Program in Paris during her junior year. Immediately after she graduated, she returned to Paris and worked as an English assistant in suburban high schools for two years. While working towards her graduate degree in Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, she also became an active member of the French literary culture and had poems published in French magazines. While in Paris, she worked as a translator, interpreter, private tutor, and library assistant, and ran a small class for grade-school students on the weekends. With music as another one of her passions, she also organized concerts at a jazz club in the 20th arrondissement. She received her Master’s degree in 2009 and returned to Seattle in 2010. She loves to teach and enjoys sharing her knowledge and experience about living in Paris.