Élisabeth Daynès

Who is Élisabeth Daynès?

Élisabeth Daynès is a French sculptor. In 1981 she worked with the Théâtre de la Salamandre in Lille creating masks for the theatre.

In 1984, she founded her own studio, Atelier Daynès, in Paris. Some years later, the Thot Museum in Montignac, close to the Lascaux caves, asked her to sculpt a life size woolly Mammoth with a group of hominids. She has since specialized in reconstructing hominids from remaining bones. Her work is present at museums all over the world, like Musée des Merveilles in Tende, Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Transvaal Museum in Pretoria and Naturhistoriska riksmuseet in Stockholm. One of her most notable sculptures is at the Krapina Neaderthal Museum in northern Croatia where she made a reconstruction of an entire seventeen member Neanderthal family. In 2005 she created a life like model of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in a project with National Geographic. A close resemblance with the real Pharaoh is likely, even though traits like ears, nose tip, and color of skin and eyes cannot be reliably reconstructed.

In 2010 Daynes won the John J.