About Frances

Franny Miculis is a visual and mixed media artist based in New York City. She began making art as soon as she could hold a brush, and over the past few years her practice has grown from sketchbook experiments into large-scale paintings, sculptural assemblages, and layered photographic collages.

Her work moves between painting, collage, photography, and fiber, often layering found materials — torn paper, yarn, beads, printed photographs — with bold color and expressive mark-making. Faces recur throughout her pieces: watching, fragmenting, and reassembling, they are her way of asking what it means to grow up, to grieve, and to thrive.

Making art is the most important thing in Franny's life right now. It is both an introspective outlet — a place to release her thoughts and feelings — and an effort to contribute something to others that might change the way they think.

Franny is dyslexic. She thinks in images before words — a challenge academically, but a gift artistically. Seeing pictures in her mind is how she works things out, whether it's a math problem or a new mixed media composition, her favorite medium. Her work is a window into a dyslexic mind, and a way of raising awareness of the possibilities for others who think the same way.

As a high school student who rides the subway to school every day, she is surrounded by the dense energy and contradictions of New York City — the street, the people, the discarded objects she picks up. She watches people constantly, whether she wants to or not, which is part of why faces are so prevalent in her work. Often they are bystanders: people who see what is happening around them but choose not to do much about it. That tension runs through her pieces.

She is motivated by the moments when a piece takes on a life of its own — interrupted by a thought, a tear, a drip, or a texture she didn't expect. Franny doesn't fear taking risks or pivoting midstream when a new conversation emerges that is too important to ignore, and each finished piece becomes a source of new material for the next.

She is also shaped by the other young artists around her. Franny has collaborated and exchanged ideas with artists from all over the world, and that back-and-forth — different places, materials, and ways of seeing — feeds directly into her work.

Alongside her own practice, she has studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia.