As a director with the John Corporation company, Émilie Rousset explores different modes of theatrical and performative writing. She uses archives and documentary research to create plays, installations and films. She collects vocabularies, ideas, observes movements of thought. She then moves them around and invents set-ups in which performers embody the words. A superposition is created between reality and fiction, between the original and its copy. After studying at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg in the directing section, she worked as an associate artist at the Comédie de Reims. In 2014, at the Grand Palais, she and Maya Boquet created Les Spécialistes, a performative piece that gets rewritten according to the context in which it is presented. She co-directed with Louise Hémon a series of short films, Rituel 1: L’Anniversaire, Rituel 2: Le Vote, Rituel 3: Le Baptême de mer and Le dernier débat. 

For the Festival d’Automne 2018, as part of the New Settings programme of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, she created Rencontre avec Pierre Pica, which transcribes her dialogue with a linguist, then co-created Rituel 4: Le Grand Débat with Louise Hémon, which stages the filming of a presidential debate. With Maya Boquet, she created Reconstitution: Le procès de Bobigny in 2019, based on the famous trial conducted by Gisèle Halimi. In 2021, as part of the Festival d’Automne, she created Les Océanographes with Louise Hémon, which explores the archives of Anita Conti, the first female oceanographer and pioneer of maritime ecology. In 2022, she created two new pieces: Rituel 5: La Mort with Louise Hémon, and Playlist Politique. These two new creations were programmed as part of the 2022 Festival d’Automne in Paris.