Missagh and Massoud Movahhed Ghaleh Nouri.

Born 14 August 1990

Born on 14 August 1990 in Paris, of Iranian heritage. Self-taught sculptor. Founder, president, and the public face of the studio.

Before the workshop, he had been a Parisian — twelve years of what he later described as a « bohemian, wastrel » youth, with a parallel life as a competitive wrestler. He began to sculpt around the age of thirty, with no academic training.

The founding story he tells of the studio takes place in two scenes. In the first, he falls asleep at the Louvre and dreams that he is a stag, witness to a new golden age. In the second, he wakes at the foot of the Vendôme Column, the great bronze column raised by Napoleon, and hears a voice instructing him to take the measure of his civilisation. He has told this story to City Journal, to The Spectator, to The New Republic, in almost identical terms.

Today he is the studio's director-general and its principal voice — in interviews, on stage, on its English-language channels.

Born 2 January 1997

Born on 2 January 1997 in Paris. Co-founder, operational counterpart, present alongside his brother at every public presentation.

The quieter half of the duo, less individually profiled by the press but visible in every video, in every San Francisco talk, in every photograph of the workshop. Where Missor plays the role of the intellectual figure, Massoud carries the operational weight of the studio.

The relationship between the two is the foundation of the workshop's stability: one speaks, the other builds, and both arrive at the same place.

The brothers are explicit about the word they prefer. This is not a studio in the contemporary art sense, but a workshop — an atelier, in the medieval and Renaissance lineage: a place where master and apprentices work together on commissioned monumental work. The compagnons are not assistants; they are part of the studio's body.

That choice of word does much of the storytelling on its own. It places the workshop in a continuity that runs from the Italian Renaissance bottega through the French royal foundries to the Compagnons du Devoir of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — a continuity the brothers actively claim.