Nancy Newman Rice was born in New York City and was educated at Cornell University and at Washington University, where she earned a BFA with honors and an MFA. She has received awards that include a National Endowment for the Arts/MMA Fellowship for painting, and nominations for a Tiffany Award and an AVA Award in the Visual Arts. Rice has exhibited her work internationally and her work is included in private collections in the U.S. and abroad.

Using Euclidian geometry as the skeleton of the experience is an approach rooted in Art History; Poussin and Cezanne both seized upon this method of pictorial organization through subtle designs and simplified spatial effects. The Sacred Space oil paintings began as an attempt to define the interiors of identifiable architectural structures by inventing elaborate geometric scaffolding to map the space within the confines of each edifice. As the oil paintings evolved the walls disappeared, seemingly erased by time, and what remained was the skeleton of intangible space, in essence, geometry as a sacred artifact.