Ellen Frances is an American multidisciplinary artist and writer based in New York City. Her practice spans painting, poetry, essays, historical research, movement, photography, sound, and design.
Her work has shown at Mana Contemporary, The Hole Gallery, Volta Art Fair, Sotheby’s Institute, Anthology Film Archives, Yeats Society Thoor Ballylee (IE), and Tönnheim Gallery (ES). Her artwork has appeared in the New York Times, the Brooklyn Rail, and Art Observed-- as well as WideWalls, CultBytes and WhiteHot Magazines. Her writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail and The Art Newspaper.
In 2023, Frances became the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at Thoor Ballylee, the historic fifteenth-century tower home of W.B. Yeats in Ireland, during the centenary year of his Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2026, her interdisciplinary research project Invisible Instrument: Breath as a Technology of Perception was selected for the Library Residency in Greece, presented by Greece in USA in conjunction with Utrecht University and The Respiratorium. Funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and the Greek Ministry of Culture.
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A self-taught painter working primarily in oil and watercolor, Ellen draws inspiration from daily journal entries as a form of contemplative practice. Many of her paintings are accompanied by handwritten poems. Stylistically, her work draws from Romantic classicism and surrealism, often merging figuration with symbolic abstraction.
Influenced by her multidisciplinary studies in law, poetry, emerging technology, theoretical physics, and astrobiology at Harvard University from 2021–2025, her work explore themes of time, consciousness, entropy, and the human condition through form.
Her first solo exhibition, Chaos Theory, was held in July 2024 with Tönnheim Gallery, in their Madrid location. The show explored Salvador Dalí’s fascination with Einstein’s theory of relativity through geometric compositions.
Her performance art work ranges from poetic recitations to silent Greco-Roman pantomime and 19th-century Ballet d’Action. Each piece is constructed from an original libretto or poem based on in-depth research across disciplines in the arts and sciences. Performances frequently incorporate original hand-sewn costumes, choreography, shadow puppetry, masks, painted backdrops, and sound compositions.
She gained underground notoriety performing monthly at avant-garde salons curated by Beckett Rosset, son of Grove Press founder Barney Rosset and namesake of Samuel Beckett from 2022 - 2023.
In summer 2023, Ellen was invited by the Yeats Society as the first-ever artist-in-residence at Thoor Ballylee, the 15th-century tower home of W.B. Yeats in Ireland, during the centenary of his Nobel Prize. There, she engaged in automatic writing, painted, and performed movement pieces inspired by The Tower, A Vision, and Four Plays for Dancers. She also collaborated with renowned harpist Aisling Ennis in a performance at the historic Killruddery House, by invitation of Lord and Lady Ardee.
Upon returning to New York, she presented a surrealist monologue adapted by award-winning author Frederic Tuten at the Volta International Art Fair. That fall, she performed a deconstructed Shakespearean piece, interwoven with W.H. Auden’s poetry, as commentary on string theory. The performance featured Ellen emerging from a hand-made Elizabethan costume constructed from her bed sheets, tied by her hair to the walls of The Hole Gallery in NYC.
In September 2024, her piece Quiet & Control was presented at a Sotheby’sInstitute event in conjunction with the Volta International Art Fair. Dressed in hand-sewn judicial robes, she slowly pulled a 24-foot-long poem about government suppression of free speech from her mouth, beneath a moving eye. The piece paid tribute to John Quinn, attorney for Joyce and Yeats, and co-founder of the Armory Show. She also performed at an underground literary event alongside Warhol-era performance art legend Penny Arcade. Ellen’s piece involved reading her diary excerpts, edited in a découpé style.
In 2026, Frances’s interdisciplinary research project Invisible Instrument: Breath as a Technology of Perception was selected for the Library Residency in Greece, a research initiative conducted in conjunction with Utrecht University, The Respiratorium, and Greece in USA.
Ellen’s essays on art have been published in The Art Newspaper (UK). As an author, she is represented by Enliven Endeavors.
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Ellen’s foundation in the performing arts began in childhood with formal training in dance and pantomime under Todd Bolender, a protégé of George Balanchine and choreographer for the Ballet Russe. She later danced with his company and continued her training at prestigious institutions including Pacific Northwest Ballet (under Francia Russell), Royal Winnipeg Ballet (under Galina Yordanova), The Harid Conservatory, and American Ballet Theater. Performance credits include roles with The Joffrey Ballet, Karole Armitage and regional Broadway tours at Starlight Theater. This immersion in classical performance traditions laid the groundwork for her later approach to art, which combines visual art, movement, and language. Throughout her adolescence she frequently read original poetry at coffee shops, and painted at home.
Ellen remains an active member of the American Guild of Musical Artists, the union representing classical performers across the United States, and the International Yeats Society.
