Nancy Jay has been a professional artist and arts educator for more than forty years. She is a retired Professor of Art at Valencia College, where she currently serves as a Senior Teaching Fellow. She was an interim Associate Professor of Art at Georgia College & State University and the Director of Drawing and Painting for Crealde' School of Art.

Jay graduated from Georgia College with a B.A. in art in 1968 and from Florida State University with an M.F.A. in Painting in 1970.  As a recipient of a National Endowment  for the Humanities Fellowship, she spent a year in residence at Brown University, participating in a seminar on Themes in Modern Art and doing research on early feminist artists and the role and representation of gender in contemporary figurative painting. As a result she wrote and taught one of the earliest courses in gender studies ever offered.

Her work has been represented in numerous group shows in The United States and in Costa Rica. Solo exhibitions include "Landscape as Text/Text as Landscape" at the John Marlor Gallery in Milledgeville, Georgia, "Rewriting the Landscape" at the Comma Gallery in Orlando, Florida, "Life Cycles" at the Cornell Museum of Fine Art in Winter Park, Florida and a Retrospective at Valencia College.

Jay’s paintings can be found in the public collections at Florida State University’s Museum of Fine Arts, Georgia College & State University, Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, The Mennello Museum of American Art, Darden Industries of Orlando, Florida and Centro Culturale in San Jose, Costa Rica, as well as in more than fifty private collections.