Career
In 1935 she joined the French cultural mission to lecture at the newly founded University of São Paulo. She taught a course on practical ethnology that attracted a large audience from the town"s educated, French-speaking society. She also founded Brazil"s first ethnological society with Mario de Andrade.
Artifacts collected during the Mato Grosso expedition first were exhibited in Paris at the Musée de l"Homme during 1937.
The title of the exhibition, Indiens du Mato-Grosso (Mission Claude et Dina Lévi-Strauss), recognized the contributions of both scientists. During the last and longest expedition to the Nambikwara she contracted an eye infection that forced her return to São Paulo, from which she then returned to France.
Her husband remained and concluded the expedition. They later divorced. Dina Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1938.
Dina took back her maiden name Dreyfus.
She later worked as a philosophy teacher in a Lycée, in university preparation classes, and in university, and she became an inspecteur général in the French education system. In the 1950s, she published articles on Bernanos and Simone Weil. In the 1960s, she translated Hume and Freud.
