Nancy Evelyn Andrews is an American artist and filmmaker whose inventive hybrid works — weaving together animation, puppetry, live-action narrative, documentary, music, and handmade props — have earned her a place among the most original voices in contemporary experimental cinema. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1983 and a Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995, where she subsequently taught video making, animation, time-based arts, and film studies before serving as a professor at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, holding the T. A. Cox Chair in Studio Arts.
Andrews works on the coast of Maine, where she creates films, drawings, props, and objects. Her practice draws on history, autobiography, popular educational materials, and found imagery, synthesizing these sources into films that resist easy categorization. Her debut feature, The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes (2015), which won a Gotham Award, exemplifies her approach: a gothic horror-musical-animation hybrid following a scientist pursuing radical experiments in human consciousness. The Museum of Modern Art has acquired six of her experimental films, and her work is held in the collections of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Throughout her career, Andrews has received major support from institutions recognizing the significance of her work. Her fellowships include the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in filmmaking (2008), two LEF New England Moving Image Fund grants, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts InterArts grant, and the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Fellowship in Visual Arts. Her films have screened at festivals internationally.
Andrews' legacy lies in her sustained commitment to a cinema that is genuinely handmade — dense with individually crafted objects, drawn images, and invented characters — and in her demonstration that experimental film can be simultaneously rigorous, playful, and emotionally resonant. As a teacher and artist, she has been an influential presence in American independent and avant-garde filmmaking for more than three decades.
