Artist, scholar, and writer Ellen Frank has received many awards in painting, book design, and scholarship including a Fulbright Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, Ford Foundation Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award in Painting, New York State Council on the Arts, and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant.

Dr. Frank studied art history and connoisseurship at Yale University, the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes, and holds an interdisciplinary doctorate in English Literature and the Visual Arts from Stanford University. In 2015 she received an honorary doctorate for her work Cities of Peace from the Russian Armenian (Slavonic) University.

Dr. Frank was Assistant Professor of English Literature at UC Berkeley where she co-designed and created the first interdisciplinary major "Literature and the Visual Arts"; she was guest Associate Professor at Barnard College and Rutgers University; Visiting Professor at School of Visual Arts and Tyler School of Art. Her first book, Literary Architecture: Essays Toward Tradition (University of California Press), was awarded the New York Institute for Graphic Arts 50 Best Books; Ronce & Coffin Club Design Award; and "Best Book in 50 Years" by University of California Press.

In 2005, Dr. Frank founded Ellen Frank Illumination Arts Foundation, Inc., a non-profit global organization dedicated to the transformative power of art to build a culture of understanding and peace. CITIES OF PEACE is its primary initiative. As artistic director, Dr. Frank has trained artist-interns from more than 25 countries, and unites scholars and experts to work on its joint creations.