Nancy Wynn is a designer, artist, curator, writer and educator. With over 35 years of experience in professional design practice, she has worked for advertising agencies and a Fortune 500 corporation, as well as in her own freelance businesses, Nancy Wynn Studio and Palindrome Partners.
As an artist, Wynn’s work has been exhibited consistently since 1996. She has been shown in NYC, LA, Japan, and in galleries throughout New England. Additionally, her artwork is included in the contemporary art collection at the William Benton Museum of Art.
Since 2003, Wynn has managed and, starting in 2005, served as Chair of the Clare Gallery in downtown Hartford, Connecticut. The Clare Gallery is a not-for-profit professional exhibition gallery located in the Franciscan Center for Urban Ministry at St. Patrick – St. Anthony Church. The Gallery promotes the arts through its exhibits and educational programs, which focus on world religious, interfaith, and social justice themes. Throughout the years, Wynn has curated numerous exhibitions, as well as organized a multitude of educational programs.
Wynn has published several articles on design, art and education. In 2018,“Let’s bring Graphic Design History to life!” was published in MAKE: 2018 AIGA Design Educators Conference; In 2015, her artwork “Prolongational Existence” and “The I in Hurricane” was published in the on-line journal, The Light Ekphrastic; and in 2012, her artwork titled, “Disaster Averted,” together with an essay titled, “My Stuff, My Memories, My Story,” appeared in the publication, Keep/Delete: Turning Messages into Keepsakes. Wynn is often called upon to speak at art, design and education conferences. In 2019, she presented “Breaking Down Biases with Toys: An Interdisciplinary Design Project that Engaged Students Across Disciplines” at Toronto, Canada’s RGD’s DesignThinkers Conference; in 2019, she presented “What does Environmentalism and Social Justice have to do with the Visual Arts? EVERYTHING!” at the FATE conference Foundations in Flux; and in 2013, she was invited to be a panelist on WNPR’s “Colin McEnroe Show” to discuss the Dada art movement.
Wynn has taught in higher education for close to 30 years. Currently, she is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Merrimack College north of Boston, Massachusetts, where she oversees the programs of Art and Art History, Graphic Design, Music, Theatre, and Film Studies. Previously at the University of Hartford, she was instrumental in the founding of two academically based design centers in the Hartford area—Civic Design, a student-staffed design center and the Center for Integrated Design (CID). CID brought together faculty and students in the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, civil engineering, business and visual communication design to solve municipal design issues for a number of local communities. In 2004, Wynn was nominated for the Ernest A. Lynton Award for faculty professional service and academic outreach.