Rebecca Alban Hoffberger

Rebecca Alban Hoffberger (born September 25, 1952, Baltimore, Maryland) is the founder and director of the American Visionary Art Museum, America's official national museum for outsider art, located in Baltimore, Maryland. A colorful public figure, she has been called “the P. T. Barnum of the outsider art world“.

Rebecca Alban Hoffberger was born in a “leafy middle-class suburb” of Baltimore, Maryland to Allen, a mechanical engineer, and Peggy Alban, a homemaker. As a child, she suffered a bout with rheumatic fever which left her with painful episodes in her legs and periodic paralysis. "During these periods of illness, Hoffberger found Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses particularly comforting and therapeutic. She also enjoyed more macabre literature, however, and was drawn to fellow-Baltimorean Edgar Allan Poe at an early age." At age 16, she was accepted to college but turned down the offer to study with the celebrated French mime Marcel Marceau in Paris, becoming the first American ever to do so. In a 2013 Baltimore Magazine article, Hoffberger said, “My parents wanted me to stay in Baltimore and learn to be a secretary or have a practical fallback, but they were very accepting.” While living in Paris, she met and married a ballet dancer who would become her first husband, and after moving back to the United States, gave birth to a daughter, Belina. Hoffberger worked as a development consultant to both a literary society and a ballet company, as well as holding a position at the Boulder Free School in Colorado before eventually moving to Mexico with her daughter. While in Mexico, she met and married her second husband, Andrija Puharich, a notable physician and parapsychologist who was studying traditional healing practices. (Puharich is perhaps best known for bringing Israeli psychic Uri Geller to the United States.) Hoffberger spent three years with Puharich helping to deliver babies in remote mountain areas in the state of Morelos, and although this marriage also ended, it produced Hoffberger’s second daughter, Athena.

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