Artist Nancy Willis lives and works in the Napa Valley, an area known for its food, wine and natural beauty. As a painter and printmaker, Willis pulls from the rituals of her daily life to explore themes of intimacy and human connection. String lights in trees, dinner table scenes and local terrain become motifs in her paintings and prints that evoke a sense of place.
Her work has been featured at the Start Up Fairs in Houston, LA and San Francisco and in recent exhibitions in Brooklyn, Albuquerque and Cincinnati.
Willis teaches painting and printmaking at the Napa Valley College and Nimbus Arts. She successfully launched Path of an Artistpainting tours to France in 2007 and expanded the workshops to Sundance in 2009 and Hudson Valley in 2024.
Willis social practice includes two curatorial projects/museum exhibitions, Nourish and Discrepancy/living between war and peace. In 2018-19, Willis was awarded consecutive ACNV Community Fund Grants for her project Conflict Zone, a collaborative printmaking project with Yazidis from Northern Iraq.
In 2025, Willis was awarded the Helen Frankenthaler Printmaking Residency at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, CT. The artist spent her residency continuing her Conflict Zone project which looks at the daily lives of those living amidst the devastation of war.
