Gabriela Frank

My work marries visual, sonic, spoken, and tactile elements with written language. In experimenting with how literary art meets other genres and forms, I seek to create unexpected moments for the rational and poetic to collide—and push the idea of what literary art can be, where we encounter it, and how it lives within our bodies. My ultimate mission is to place literary art in the path of everyday life. I believe that the embodied experience is the gateway to self-knowledge and existential understanding; how we sense and what we feel are part of who we are. An interdisciplinary exchange between science, art, and humanities feeds two central themes running throughout my body of work: how human forge systems of belief by which we live, and how we dare to love anything in a world where everything dies.

Gabriela Denise Frank, "A Novel Performance" (live performance installation in Seattle's Central Library), 2014

Gabriela Denise Frank is an Italian American literary artist whose work expands from the page into the sonic, the visual, and the physical. Her writing contemplates identity, feminism, ancestors, and the ecotone between humans and environment. Her writing has appeared in True Story, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, Hunger Mountain, Bayou, Baltimore Review, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her essay, “BAD DATE,” was named a Notable Essay of 2020 by Best American Essays 2021. Off the page, her installations and performances transform storytelling into experience. In Seattle’s Central Library, she staged “A Novel Performance,” a month-long performance installation in which she wrote a novel as the public watched—live. In Jack Straw’s New Media Gallery she installed “UGLY ME,” a multi-media spoken word exhibition that explored beauty and self-worth through the medium of the selfie. Gabriela’s work is supported by 4Culture, Centrum, the Civita Institute, Invoking the Pause, Jack Straw, Mineral School, Vermont Studio Center, and Willapa Bay. An advocate for public art and artists, Gabriela serves as a public art commissioner for the City of Burien, a 4Culture's arts advisory committee member, and as the creative nonfiction editor of Crab Creek Review.