Professional Bio

Nancy Robinson is a surrealistic painter who works primarily in oil paint on canvas. She paints iconographic self-portraits based on her daily life experiences.

Robinson was born in New York City. She graduated from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, with a B.A cum laude in English.

Robinson has been the recipient of two Individual Artist Fellowship Grants and two Artist Initiative Grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, a Travel and Study Grant from the Jerome, Target and General Mills Foundations, a Jerome Artist Residency Grant through the Blacklock Nature Sanctuary and several Jerome Mentor/Protegee Scholarship Grants through the Women's Art Registry of Minnesota, where she was a Mentor from 1990-2002.

From 1999-2001 she was an adjunct professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. From 1999-2019 she was a Guest Artist for the Women's Art Institute at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and at Saint Catherine University. She also does a lot of guest speaking about her art and career, including at St. Olaf College in March 2021, as part of the Arnold Flaten Memorial Artist Series.

She has exhibited her work regionally and nationally, including Sin and Guilt: Paintings by Nancy Robinson, a 2009 solo show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Other venues where she has exhibited include Artemisia Gallery (Chicago), A.I.R. Gallery (New York), the Minnesota Historical Society, the Minnesota State Arts Board, The Soap Factory, the Affordable Art Fair (New York), and the Katherine E. Nash Gallery (University of Minnesota). From 2013 t0 2016 she was in several shows at Instinct Art Gallery (Minneapolis), most notably the 2014 Self and Others exhibition and the 2016 Unfiltered: the Art of Sue Coe, Nancy Robinson and the Guerrilla Girls. Recent exhibitions include Pandemic Art Lessons, an invitational virtual art exhibition on the website of the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery, Saint Catherine University and Talking Pictures: New Paintings by Nancy Robinson and Patricia Olson, an invitational painting exhibit at Form+Content Gallery in Minneapolis.