The Artist

1930 New York, USA

Dorothy Fall is the wife of the late Bernard Fall, a Fulbright scholar, the highly regarded French journalist who wrote the classics Street Without Joy and Hell in a Very Small Place, which detailed the French experience in Vietnam. One of the first (and the best-informed) Western observers to say that the United States could not win there either, he was killed in Vietnam in 1967 while accompanying a Marine platoon. In memory and honor of her husband, in 2006 Dorothy published a book about their life together after years of research in the newly opened archives in Washington D.C. For this book, Bernard Fall: Memories of a Soldier-Scholar, she conducted interviews over 30 years in the United States, France, and Vietnam including with General Vo Nguyen Giap. She also drew from her husband’s correspondence, autobiographical writings, and notes written in Vietnam.

Dorothy Fall began her own career as deputy art director for Amerika Magazine with the United States Information Agency in Washington, D.C. from 1956 to 1980. Following this appointment, she was owner and art director of Fall Design Communications in Washington D.C. from 1980 to 1988. She also was the director of Gallery 10 in Washington, D.C. from 1994 to 2001. Ms. Fall has also contributed to Pyramid Atlantic Art Center on the board of directors and as president. Her early professional work was in the graphic field but her love has always been in fine art.

In 1997 Fall came to Hanoi for her first visit to the country to which her husband had dedicated his life and met with Suzanne in her Tree of Life art salon. After many hours of discussion, they decided to mount an exhibition of an exchange of artists from Hanoi and international artists from the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Washington D.C., all who made works on handmade paper. In 2000, In Praise of Paper, opened at the Vietnam Fine Arts University, Hanoi, Vietnam with Dorothy, her daughter Nicole, also an artist, and other foreign artists from Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in attendance.

Fall has performed over 21 solo exhibitions worldwide and in 2019 was awarded the Albert Nelson Marquis Who’s Who Lifetime Achievement Award as a leader in the arts. She continues to paint and exhibit to this day.

Fall received her BFA from Syracuse University New York, USA in 1952, postgraduate coursework at the American University in Washington, D.C. from 1956 to 1958 and in 1961 she completed coursework at the Academic de la Grande Chaumière and Academic Julian in Paris, France.