Gabrielle Selz was born in Pomona, California, and grew up in the New York City art world and the bohemian world of Berkeley, California in the 1960’s & 1970’s. Her father was a Professor of Art History at the University of Berkeley and the former Curator of Painting & Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art.  Her mother was a short story writer and teacher.  Following her parents' divorce, she lived for a number of years in the utopian artists housing project, Westbeth, surrounded by people with huge appetites and wild imaginations, who practiced “life as art”.  Ms. Selz has used these often challenging and dramatic experiences as inspiration in her writing and she continues to reach back and explore its ramifications.

At 17, Ms. Selz moved to California, in order to attended the University of California at Santa Cruz and be closer to her father.  It was an indelible period, much of which she chronicled in her manuscript Rush, which was short listed for the Bakeless literary prize for fiction, sponsored by Bread Loaf Writers Conference and Houghton Mifflin. Later, Ms. Selz moved back East and received her MFA from City College in New York. 

Currently, she is completing a memoir on her journey with her mother, through the terrain of Alzheimer's dementia, No Country: A Memoir of Forgetting.  

Gabrielle Selz is a 2009 fellow in Nonfiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. At present, Ms. Selz lives in Southampton, NY with her son Theo and their feisty, little dog, Rufi.