Cathy Dreyfuss
Cathy Dreyfuss was born in New York, raised in Los Angeles, and has lived on Venice Beach for the last 45 years. She started out as a pianist, cartoonist and hippie traveler, then became a criminal defense attorney and social justice warrior, active in the National Lawyers Guild, Humanitarian Law Project, and Impact Fund Foundation.
She worked for the Los Angeles and Humboldt County public defender offices, the ACLU of Southern California, the Northern California Innocence Project, and Immigrant Defenders Law Center, enjoying singing, salsa and zydeco dancing in her spare time.
She represented indigent defendants and immigrants in criminal courts from 1984 to 2022, when she decided to leave lawyering for a more creative life. She has been writing personal stories for several years and is currently working on a memoir about her travels in the 1970’s