Artist and writer Ellen Frank received her bachelor of arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles; and her M.A. and Ph.D in literature and visual arts from Stanford and Yale universities. She was Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley from 1973 -1977.

Among her published works are the award winning Literary Architecture: Essays Toward A Tradition (University of California Press: 1979 hardcover; 1983 paperback), and many essays on painting, architecture and literature. Her creative writing has been published in Pequod and White Walls; her first play Frida@chiapas.net (co-written with Maria Pessino, founder and director of Oddfellows Productions), received its first reading in New York City at the Theatre for the New, and its second reading July 1999, at Robert Wilson's Watermill Center.

Ellen Frank has received awards for both her painting and her writing. These awards include a Fulbright Fellowship to London in Aesthetic Theory under Professor Sir Ernst Gombrich; Ford Foundation Grant in Lithography;Pollock-Krasner

Award in Painting; a New York Foundation of the Arts Award for her original illuminated manuscript in 1997; and four New York State Council on the Arts awards: one in 1999 as a Founder of Ninbark International: Art Concepts, and one in 2000 for her Illumination Atelier Project and Hanukkah Illuminated: A Book of Days.

Ellen Frank's work has been exhibited throughout the United States. She was invited to inaugurate "T" at the Soho Guggenheim with a sequence of 18 paintings; and in 1999 she received a commission from J/Brice of Boston to create an 84-foot mural in gold, copper and silver leaf on linen.

Ellen Frank was Professor and Guest Artist at Barnard College and at Rutgers University in 2001.