Sasha Ferrer

Suzi Ferrer (May 24, 1940 – April 6, 2006) (born Susan Nudelman, also known as Sasha Ferrer, was a visual artist based in San Juan, Puerto Rico from the mid-1960s to 1975. She is known for her transgressive, irreverent, avant-garde, art brut and feminist work. Suzi was the eldest child of Ruth Epstein Susser and Samuel Nudelman, both second generation Austrian, Polish and Belarusian Jewish immigrants. Sasha, as her parents referred to her, graduated from Jamaica High School, New York, in 1958, where she excelled and was active in the drama department. Her main interest was acting and she hoped to make a career in television.In the summer of 1958, Nudelman enrolled in the Fine Arts program at Cornell University, graduating in 1962. She exhibited her work at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art (now the Herbert F. Johnson Museum) and the Franklin Gallery, both on the university campus. While at Cornell, she also continued acting, appearing in several campus plays as well as a brief stint on Broadway in The Pajama Game in 1959.After graduating, Sasha married Puerto Rican Miguel A. Ferrer, whom she met while he was studying for his MBA at Cornell University. They moved to New York City, visiting galleries and buying contemporary art. They lived a nomadic life, traveling between New York and San Juan during the first years of their marriage. With their daughter, Ilena (b. 1964), the Ferrers settled permanently in Puerto Rico in the mid-1960s. Their son, Miguel, was born in Puerto Rico in 1969.By the mid-1970s, Ferrer stopped producing art and delved into other creative pursuits. She relocated to San Francisco, and as "Sasha Ferrer", she worked as a cultural manager, graphic designer, publicist, and community liaison for the San Francisco Arts Commission Neighborhood Arts Program. She offered workshops on television camera techniques and worked as a consultant for the marketing firm Beyl & Boyd. In the late 1970s, she was hired to do a study of the physics and psychology of color to design the corporate image for the Vancouver Canucks hockey team.In late 1979, she began her work in television at Videowest, a San Francisco based alternative theme show where she worked as a producer, writer, actress, and director, meeting her future husband, Stephen Goldsmith, in the process. In 1982, she created and directed the television pilot for young people, Smarkus and Company, leading to her move to Los Angeles in 1983. Once in LA, Ferrer initially worked as an executive at the Disney Channel and in subsequent years worked at Endemol, Triage Productions, Warner Bros. and The Landsburg Company, the latter producing her TV movie In Defense of a Married Man. In 1987 she was stricken with breast cancer, a disease that came and went over the remainder of her life. Drawing on her own experience, Ferrer wrote and produced the NBC documentary Destined to Live, that chronicled the recovery journey of a hundred breast cancer patients, for which she received a 1990 Humanitas Prize. However, 19 years after her initial cancer diagnosis, and after many periods of remission, she relapsed, passing away in Los Angeles in April 2006, just short of her 66th birthday.