Patricia Dreyfus

Biography

Patricia Dreyfus Gerber was born in Dakar, Senegal, 1951, where she stayed for one year.  

After returning to Paris, her parents separated and she lived with her brothers and mother, One brother is a year older and one a year younger.  Both left for boarding school when they were 8 and 10 respectively and Patricia stayed behind with a mother who was rarely present, her childhood turning into a life of solitude.  Her father visited only once or twice a year for a few days.

Between 1968 and 1970, she decided to travel alone first to London and then to New York and this habit to travel alone all around the world will always remain part of her life.

Upon returning to Paris, in 1970, she was hired by a film production company and learned to use the first computers for film editing.  She was fascinated by images and became a film editor and then a video film maker. 

While working with videos, she took drawing courses at the Grande Chaumière Academy and then took part in workshops organized by the American Center in Paris by American artists such as Gregory Mazurovski and Cyril Heck.

From 1972 to 1992, she was a video film maker and sculptor in Paris.

As a video editor, Patricia worked on many music videos with the American producer David Niles and she produced and created several films on, and for, artists.  These documentaries accompanied their expositions in museums: “The life and work of Shirley Goldfarb, an American painter in Montparnasse. “(The Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1981)” Boris Tissot, sculptor and painter on pastry dough” Pompidou Centre, 1983), etc.  She made advertisement films for large companies like Helena Rubinstein, IBM, Heineken, the French Army, etc.  She received an award at the Business Film Festival in Biarritz, in 1987 for her film « la Rencontre au Sommet. »

After having her first daughter in 1975, Patricia married in 1984 and had three other children, one of who died accidentally in 1992.  After this tragic date, the family moved to Basel, Switzerland, where Patricia still lives and works, by now on her own.  In Basel, she abandoned making documentaries and films for companies in order to focus on work of a more personal nature: works in sculpture, photography, and video.  1992 was also the beginning of the creation of her hundreds of heads, an ongoing activity that Patricia does not even interrupt when traveling.