Ephraim Friedman discovered sculpture at the age of four when a Works Progress Administration art teacher handed him a hunk of clay and encouraged him to “make something.” He has continued to build figures of people, animals, and birds ever since.
Formal training in sculpture included classes with Ernest Morenon and Court Bennett at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the sixties, Nancy Schon in the seventies, and Lloyd Lillie, Carol Keller and Albert Weinberg at the Boston University School for the Arts in the nineties. In addition, Friedman studied drawing with Stuart Baron at Boston University, Nathan Goldstein at the Art Institute, and Robert Cormier in Gloucester. He is indebted to Jim Montgomery, New England Sculpture Service, for bronze casting
Friedman has been a member of the Pine Manor College drawing group for the past 20 years. He is currently sculpting portraits of two physicians, one at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, the other at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, and a second chess set depicting birds of prey. He has served on the Board of Montserrat College of Art.
Ephraim Friedman has had a long and varied career as an ophthalmologist, hospital and medical school administrator, teacher and researcher. Upon graduating from the University of California School of Medicine he served at the School of Aviation Medicine of the United States Air Force. After his training in Ophthalmology at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, he became Chairman of the Ophthalmology Department and later Dean of the Medical School at Boston University. He moved to New York to become Dean of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and then back to Boston as President of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School.
Throughout his medical career he has studied the cause of Age Related Macular Degeneration. He has developed a Vascular Model, which suggests that the disease results from decreased circulation caused by progressive stiffening of the tissues in the eye and might be treated using methods developed to fight hardening of the arteries.
Ephraim and his wife Dagmar Benioff Friedman reside in Beverly Farms and summer on a lake in Northern Maine. They have four children (Deborah, David, Jonathan, and Karen) and eight grandchildren.