BIO
FRANCES MELHOP
Frances Melhop is a visual artist, curator and gallery director, born in Christchurch, New Zealand, living and working at Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
Melhop works in tactile mediums such as photography, printmaking, hand embroidery, sculpture and oil paint exploring the tensions between the virtual and physical ways we experience the world. Her focus is on human presence and absence in our screen and material lives, reveling in imperfection and evidence of the human hand.
Melhop has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide at notable institutions such as Autry Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Brownsville Museum (Brownsville,TX), Cincinnati Art Museum, (Cincinnati, OH), Murray State University, (Murray, KY), Gertrude Herbert Institute, (Augusta, GA), and Arizona State University, (Phoenix, AZ). She has exhibited collaborative works with Susan Norrie at Nancy Hoffman Gallery (New York, NY) and the NSW Museum of Art, (Sydney, Australia).
Awards include, Nevada Arts Council Fellowship 2025, University of Nevada, Reno, Outstanding Artist Award, 2019, NNDA Innovator of the Year 2014, Luerzers Archive World’s Best Photographers 2009/2010.
In 2020 as founder, curator and artist, she opened Melhop Gallery °7077, at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, representing 12 national and international artists. She also curates themed group shows with other invited exceptional artists. For the last 6 years she also taught in the art departments of University of Nevada, Reno, Western Nevada College, Truckee Meadows Community College and Lake Tahoe Community College.
Melhop spent her early career as an acclaimed editorial fashion photographer based out of Sydney, Australia, and Milan, Italy. She made narrative fairytale photographic stories of women for women. Her work appeared in Vogue Australia, Vogue Italia editions, Vogue Pelle and Vogue Gioielli, Elle Portugal, Gioia Italy, Casamica, and Marie Claire Italy.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Photography and Art History, a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Art from University of Nevada, Reno, and a post graduate CAS in Curatorial Practices from Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland.
Frances is represented in Europe by Paola Sciarretta at PS Artists Management Italy, and by Melhop Gallery º7077 in the USA
MELHOP GALLERY º7077 originated as a brick-and-mortar gallery at Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA, and has since transitioned into a nomadic curatorial platform under the direction of artist and curator Frances Melhop. This evolution reflects a deliberate reimagining of the role and function of the contemporary art gallery within a rapidly shifting cultural and geopolitical landscape.
Rejecting the fixity of a static location, the gallery adopts a site-responsive model in which exhibitions are conceived and staged in relation to the conceptual and material concerns of the artists’ practices. Melhop’s dual perspective as both practitioner and curator informs an approach grounded in transparency, ethical stewardship, and sustained dialogue between artists, collectors, and audiences. The program privileges contexts that extend and augment the thematic and formal investigations within each artist’s work, creating temporal interventions that are both intellectually rigorous and socially resonant.
The gallery represents twelve predominantly female, emerging to mid-career artists whose practices span diverse media and critical frameworks. Through sustained mentorship and strategic career development, MELHOP GALLERY º7077 fosters long-term artistic growth while facilitating access to international networks of collectors and institutions. The represented artists work across a global geography — from Lake Tahoe, Nevada, and California, to New York, Seoul, Kumamoto, Japan, London, and Moscow — situating the gallery within an expanded, transnational discourse of contemporary art.