Pressly grew up Nanuet, New York, a small rural town, twenty-five miles north of New York City. After graduating from Goucher College, she lived in Manhattan for nine years, where she was immersed in the art scene and the publishing world, earned a master’s degree in art history from Columbia University and began her art museum career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In New York she met her husband, also an art historian and they began to share a life of writing and scholarship, travel, and looking at art. Pressly considers herself fortunate to have had three different careers in the museum field: as a curator and scholar organizing several important scholarly exhibitions, most notably the acclaimed Fuseli Circle in Rome: Early Romantic Art of the 1770s at the Yale Center for British Art; as a high-profile administrator at the NEA, where she was assistant director of the Museum Program; and, beginning in 1993, as President of Nancy L. Pressly & Associates, a nationally recognized museum consulting firm specializing in strategic planning. Her clients included some of the nation’s leading art museums, among them the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Phillips Collection, Barnes Collection, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Albright-Knox Art Gallery as well as the Association of Art Museum Directors. She has traveled extensively throughout the states and Europe, living for two years in London. Recently Pressly became a potter, “making” objects for the first time.