Bio

Erica Franz (b October 8, 1984)

I work across mediums — colored pencil, watercolor, mixed media — making the missing parts impossible to miss. We notice a missing limb. We rarely notice the quieter ways someone’s come apart.

I started riding horses at nine years old, working professionally with them for two decades. Somewhere along the way, I taught myself web development out of necessity. I became a licensed Massage & NeuroMuscular Therapist in my early twenties, and went to art school a few years after that — by then I’d already spent half my life learning how bodies move, break, and hold things they don’t say out loud.

I studied Fine Art formally, then spent the years after ignoring most of it, letting myself re-approach it as an inexperienced beginner. Eventually the self-taught coding became a career; I work in tech full time now. Sometimes it feels like I’ve lived 100 different lives.

In 2020 I moved into a converted ambulance for five years, moving up and down the Pacific coast, which has a way of teaching you what you can actually live without.

I’m currently healing from Breast Implant Illness and mercury poisoning — a slow, ongoing process of figuring out what my own body’s been missing, eating a mostly raw carnivore diet along the way. It’s hard not to see the throughline: I’ve spent my life learning to notice what’s absent, in other bodies and in my own, long before I knew how to put it on paper.

I’m also the author of Zero (May 2026), a collection of poems and prose that circles a lot of the same questions my visual work does.

I live and create in San Diego County, California.