Helene Cardona Biography

Hélène Cardona is a citizen of the United States, France and Spain.

Hélène was born in Paris of a Greek mother and Spanish father and raised all over Europe. She has lived in Geneva, London, Cambridge, Llandudno, Wales, Monte-Carlo, Bremen, Tarragona, Paris, New York City and Santa Monica, and travels extensively. She is fluent in English, French, Spanish, German, Greek and Italian.

She studied English Philology and Literature in Cambridge, England; Spanish at the International Universities of Santander and Baeza, Spain; and German at the Goethe Institute in Bremen, Germany. She graduated from the Music Conservatory in Geneva in piano. She attended Hamilton College, New York, where she was also assistant professor of French and Spanish.

She received her Master's in American Literature from the Sorbonne, Paris, where she wrote her thesis on Henry James.

She has worked as a translator/interpreter for the Canadian Embassy, the French Chamber of Commerce and as a translator and language coach for the film and music industry.
Hélène translated the Lawrence Bridges film Muse of Fire for the NEA and has received grants from the Durfee Foundation and the French Cultural Services of Los Angeles.
She also translated into French What We Carry by Dorianne Laux, poems by Eloise Klein Healy, Sholeh Wolpe and John FitzGerald, and the poetry of her father José Manuel Cardona.
She is the author of the poetry collection Dreaming My Animal Selves and of a series of children’s stories. She is collaborating with David St John, translating into French the libretto of his novel in verse The Face.
She has taught at the École Active Bilingue in Paris and at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She has been guest lecturer at Brown University and U.C. Irvine, featured poetry reader at the L.A. Times Festival of Books and on national radio.

A new edition of her first book, The Astonished Universe, an uplifting and luminous bilingual collection of poetry about consciousness, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Richard Wilbur writes that “each poem fully exists in two tongues at once, and this adds to the book’s great charm and visionary quality.”

Her poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Mythic Passages, The American Center for Artists, Askew, Spillway and Pirene’s Fountain.

A graduate of The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, she trained with Ellen Burstyn at the Actors’ Studio, and with Sandra Seacat, Sondra Lee, Susan Batson and Penny Allen. She performed the lead in plays at the Actors’ Studio, The Players’ Club, UBU Theatre Rep. and The Naked Angels in New York.

Hélène played Françoise 'Fuffi' Drou in Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat and Candy Heskin in Lawrence Kasdan’s Mumford. Her voice credits include Hereafter, Inception, The A-Team, Knight and Day, Robin Hood, Inglourious Basterds, The Painted Veil, The Interpreter, The Bourne Supremacy, The Terminal, The Pink Panther and many others. For Serendipity, she co-wrote with director Peter Chelsom and composer Alan Silvestri the song 'Lucienne', which she also sang.

Hélène is also an equestrian, dancer, a lyricist, dream analyst and yoga practitioner