She attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was affiliated with the CoBrA group, along with her husband, South African artist Ernest Mancoba.
[3] She debuted at the annual Artists' Autumn Salon (Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling) in 1935 with two plaster sculptures, Bird with Young and Two Living Beings.
From the mid-1930s she was involved with the artists' group and art journal Linien (The Line, 1934–39), which was the first conduit of French Surrealism to Denmark.
In 1937 she settled in Paris, where she met and socialized with the Surrealist artists Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti, whose studio was in the same building as hers.
[4][5] In Denmark Ferlov Mancoba was already interested in non-Western art; in Paris she developed her knowledge of ethnographic objects at the newly reopened Musée de l'Homme.