Kate Frank is a ceramic artist born and raised in New York City. She earned her BA cum laude from Connecticut College in 2019, where she received the Jane Bill Award for Maintaining the Highest Standard of Work in the Art Department, and her MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2025, where her thesis was selected by the exhibition director for a special showing at the Gelman Gallery.

Before pursuing her graduate studies, Kate spent several years as a full-time lower school teacher in New York City, an experience that shaped her approach to teaching and making. She holds that meaningful education is built on genuine inclusion — not just diversity, but the active, ongoing work of making sure every person feels seen and valued, something she continues to learn from as much as practice.

Underlying all of Kate’s work is a belief that making is a fundamentally communal act. The visible marks of the hand, the hours of repetition, the imperfections no machine could replicate — these are not just aesthetic choices but an invitation to connect. It is the same conviction that drives her teaching: when people have the space and tools to make something with their hands, something genuine tends to follow.

At the center of Kate’s practice is a resistance to exactness. Believing that the hand’s imprecision is a feature rather than a flaw, she pursues processes — moldmaking, handbuilding, and automatic drawing — that make the labor of making visible. Her surfaces are treated as their own distinct element, built up through layers of hand-painted underglaze and carved line work. Influenced by the maximalism and feminist undercurrents of the Pattern and Decoration movement, Kate approaches functionality as an open question: if beauty lights up the mind, then aesthetics are utility, and a vessel and a sculpture need not be different things.

Kate has served as a studio assistant to established artists and as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at RISD. Her work has been exhibited at the Gelman Gallery and Sol Koffler Gallery in Providence, the Rhode Island Convention Center, and SK Gallery in Manhattan, among others. She is a member of the National Council on Education for Ceramic Art (NCECA) and is affiliated with Sculpture Space NYC.