Nancy Jo Ward is an award-winning international artist who takes an interdisciplinary approach to art-making. Ward, who was born in Dayton, Ohio, remembers watching the highly publicized “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match and being moved by the language of the Equal Rights Amendment in the U.S. in the 1970s. The loss of her mother when she was young has impacted her practice. She identifies with those early years negotiating issues of gender and identity as a significant influence on her art.
An early focus on the arts led her to earn her bachelor’s degree in 1980 at the School of Visual Arts and exhibitions in New York. Curiosity and pluck led her to California, where she established a business as a designer and taught Art & Design at Allan Hancock College, and lectured at Cal Poly University.
Ward went on to earn her MFA at the University of Arts London, where she studied Fine Art Digital at Camberwell University under professor Jonathan Kearney. Her art has always had a solid figurative base but shifted as she experimented with expressing personal narratives using hybrid processes and exploring various media through algorithms and artificial intelligence. Recent work inspired by the infinitely variable visual culture of the web embraces limited features on iPhone apps, AR, and time-based projects.
The well-traveled artist has completed several artist residencies in Europe and has work included in two books focused on “Art during the time of COVID.” Her works have been exhibited in juried, solo, and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Venice, Athens, Vienna, and Dubai.
Ward continues to pursue and explore the representation of women. Her fictional portraits result from innovation, experimentation, hybridization of forms, materials, and techniques that mix past and present.