Ultra Violet

French-American artist, author, and both a colleague of Andy Warhol and one of the pop artist's so-called "Superstars." Earlier in her career, she worked for and studied with surrealist artist Salvador Dalí. Dufresne lived and worked in New York City, and also had a studio in Nice, France.

Isabelle Collin Dufresne was brought up in a strict religious upper-middle-class family, but she rebelled at an early age. She was instructed at a Catholic school, and then a reform school. In 1953, she received a BA in Art at Le Sacré Cœur in Grenoble, France. She soon left France to live with an older sister in New York City.

In 1954, after a meeting with Salvador Dalí, she became his "muse", pupil, studio assistant, and lover in both Port Lligat, Spain, and in New York City. Later, she would recall, "I realized that I was 'surreal', which I never knew until I met Dalí." In the 1960s, Dufresne began to follow the progressive American Pop Art scene including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and James Rosenquist.

In 1963, Dalí introduced Dufresne to Andy Warhol, and soon she moved into the orbit of his unorthodox studio, "The Factory". In 1964 she selected the stage name "Ultra Violet" at Warhol's suggestion, because it was her preferred fashion — her hair colour at the time was often violet or lilac. She became one of many "superstars" in Warhol's Factory, and played multiple roles in over a dozen films between 1965 and 1974.

In 1967 Ultra Violet played a part (with, among others, Taylor Mead) in the surrealistic play Desire Caught by the Tail by Pablo Picasso when it was set for the first time in France at a festival in Saint-Tropez. She would eventually appear in more than 20 films, not counting numerous documentaries made at the Factory.

In 1969, she was "dethroned" as Warhol's primary muse by Viva, a more recent discovery. In the 1980s, she gradually drifted away from the Factory scene, taking a lower profile and working independently on her own art.