Frances Gillmor was a professor in the English Department at The University of Arizona, serving from 1934 until her retirement in 1973. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of Arizona in 1928 and an M.A. in English in 1931, following attendance at the University of Chicago from 1921 to 1923. Gillmor also received a Doctora en Letras from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1957. Upon graduating with her bachelor's degree, she accepted a teaching assistantship in the English Department at the University of Arizona, where she taught courses in English, creative writing, literature, and Southwestern literature. Prior to her full professorship at UA, she served as an instructor in English at the University of New Mexico for two years. In 1943, she founded the University of Arizona Folklore Committee, which she chaired until her retirement, and established the Folklore Archive in 1945 to preserve folkloric materials including songs, tales, remedies, and interviews collected from Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, with a focus on traditions of English and Spanish-speaking peoples of the Southwest.

Gillmor's academic interests encompassed Native American cultures of the Southwest, Aztec codices and history, and folklore traditions in Mexico and Spain. Her major publications include Thumbcap Weir (1929), Windsinger (1930), Traders to the Navajo (1934, an adaptation of her M.A. thesis), Fruit Out of Rock (1940), The Flute of the Smoking Mirror: A Portrait of Nezahualcoyotl, Poet-King of the Aztecs (1949), and The King Danced in the Marketplace (1964). She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959 to study folk drama, named a Fellow of the American Folklore Society in 1962, received the University of Arizona Alumni Association’s Faculty Achievement Award in 1969, and the University of Arizona Creative Teaching Award in 1970. Through her fieldwork, writings, and archival efforts, Gillmor made lasting contributions to the study of Southwestern folklore and Native American narratives within the field of Literature.