Nancy Frank comes from a family of artists. She grew up in Los Angeles in the 60s, graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute with a Masters’ degree in video and performance art; her thesis was performed live on a San Francisco radio station.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, she served as Video Curator and Assistant Director of La Mamelle / ART COM, a forward-thinking San Francisco performance art space and archive where she created the first artists’ video collection in Northern California. Nancy was a popular lecturer on California performance and video art on several trips to Europe.

She compiled most of the photographic images used in the books Performance Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art and Correspondence Art: Source Book for the Network of International Postal Art, both published by Contemporary Arts Press.

Over 800 early video works were donated to the Pacific Film Archives at UC Berkeley when ART COM closed in 1997. The interdisciplinary archives of La Mamelle / ART COM are now part of Stanford’s Special Library Collections; several recent PhDs have been written based on this collection.

Later Nancy was the Visual Arts Curator for Bill Graham Productions bringing artists markets to eight Lalapalooza music festivals at Shoreline Amphitheater and creating personalized backstage artist environments for Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Peter Gabriel and the Indigo Girls to name a few.

A slice of Bay Area art history, she also attended the very first Burning Man event when it was a private gathering hosted by Burning Man founder Larry Harvey.

Today she considers herself an urban anthropologist and has a real talent for finding recycled treasures at estate sales and thrift stores.