About

I embrace the challenge of recreating the world through my art, but I am often surprised by the stories that emerge. The resulting work is frequently surreal and engaging. Portraits are rarely straightforward and still lifes are often “not so still” with objects falling, floating, and flying. Fascinated by reflections which create worlds within worlds, I depict objects and rooms seen through the distortion of curved surfaces. The work invites you to enter into a world that is at once strange and familiar.

Ironically, we now live in a world that is both strange yet familiar. The Climate Crisis has altered our planet more quickly than predicted. Living with this shadow over us prompted me to create several drawing series: Portraits of Glaciers, Dead Horse Bay, and Ugly Fruit express concern for the environment, stressed by global threats. Read more in Portraits of Glaciers: Art, Identity and the Self in Retreat on the Columbia Climate School’s State of the Planet.

My ongoing drawing series, SELF, created over four decades, is a series of self-portraits that have become an unexpected lifetime journey. Using the vocabulary of my own forms and features, I bear witness to the changes of time on myself, but also the ways I am affected by what is happening around me, offering a broader experience of being human.

Fran Beallor had a blast showing her 366 self portraits from 2020, and other examples of her ongoing series, SELF, in a Solo Exhibition at El Barrio’s Artspace PS 109 in East Harlem, NYC in September 2022. Hung in 12 large month blocks, SELF 2020 was on view along with examples from the prior years’ series and some of Beallor’s larger self-portrait paintings as well. In all over 550 drawings, paintings, and prints were on display!

Beallor has been the subject of radio, in-print, and online interviews, including one in Art Spiel in conjunction with her Solo Show. Feature articles and reviews have also appeared in the American Arts Quarterly, American Artist Magazine, and others. In 2020, she won the Morgan Library and Museum’s online Portrait contest with her painting, Circle Dance. She has also received a Greenshields Grant for Excellence in Realist Art.

Beallor has a long history of exhibiting her paintings, drawings, and prints in NYC and beyond. Solo and group shows include the William Carlos Williams Center for the Arts, Denise Bibro Gallery, the Brattleboro Museum, the Butler Art Institute, and the Morris Museum. Corporate, public, and private collections include the 9/11 Museum and the Copelouzos Museum in Athens, Greece. Beallor attended Antioch College, the Art Students League, and the Brooklyn Museum Art School. She lives and works in Manhattan.

Watch: Fran Beallor, Artist, a video portrait by Comice Johnson ↗

Community, giving back, and offering artists a voice through curating are at the core of her practice. Concern for the environment is at the core of her being. In 2025 she curated Our Fragile Moment and Water’s Voice, two sister shows on the climate at Hudson Guild in Chelsea, with a full program of artist and curator talks, workshops, and a night of Hot Climate Art Films. Earth in the Balance followed at the Interchurch Center in 2026.

As co-president of the New York Artists Circle during the pandemic, she co-created the group’s new website and its online Curated Shows, opening with Fragile Earth in 2021. She completed the Artists Equity Curatorial Residency in 2022, has served on the board of Artists Talk on Art, and consults with artists on statements, proposals, portfolios, and websites.

Beallor teaches art to all ages, specializing in portfolio development for high school and college. Former students attend RISD, Parsons, SCAD, Carnegie Mellon, SAIC, and Boston University, as well as LaGuardia, Frank Sinatra, Art & Design, and other arts high schools in New York City. About lessons