Bio

The Nancy Who Drew

Nancy Wait was born in Chicago in 1949 and grew up in New York City where she  studied acting at the High School of Performing Arts. After two years in the theater department at Carnegie-Mellon, she moved to London and attended RADA. Nancy had a career in England during the 1970s under the name of Nancie Wait,working in film, theater and television. When she returned to the States after seven years she took up painting, and during the 1980s she was a freelance artist doing portraits and architectural renderings.

Self-Portrait in oil (1980)

She also painted a series of paintings from her imagination she called Journey to the Deep, the final one being that of a young girl looking very much alive at the bottom of the ocean. It was after that painting that she received an inner message telling her she didn’t have to paint anymore, and it was time now to put her story into words. Eventually she went back to college to study writing and finish her degree at the New School, continuing onto grad school at Goddard College. Fourteen years and an uncountable number of revisions later, her memoir, The Nancy Who Drew, is now available in paperback at Amazon.com. The Kindle version as well as other e-book formats will be available in July, 2011.

The Nancy Who Drew, the memoir that solved a mystery, begins more than half a century ago and tells the story of a shy dreamy girl who is betrayed by her mother. Wounded and confused, she flees to London to become an actress and have her own life, but finds that the past will not let her go. Only when she stops running and starts drawing and painting the dreams that have haunted her since childhood, will she discover the clue that makes sense of it all. And eventually she realizes that betrayal is sacred when the heart can encompass the whole.

detail of watercolor by NW

For the past two years she has been hosting a blog talk radio show called Art and Ascension, website http://artandascension.com/ and has recently begun to make videos of her paintings.