Nancy L. Pressly

A graduate of Goucher College and Columbia University, where she received a master’s in art history, Nancy L. Pressly began her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and subsequently held positions at the Yale Center for British Art and the San Antonio Museum of Art. She served as assistant director of the museum program at the National Endowment for the Arts for eight years before founding Nancy L Pressly & Associates, a nationally recognized museum-consulting firm specializing in strategic planning.

Intrigued that little was known about her husband’s family prior to 1830, although they had settled in South Carolina before the Revolutionary War, she began to research the Pressly family’s first decades in South Carolina and in the process met descendants of several other families who had lived in the nineteenth-century rural farming community in Abbeville District, much of which today has receded into the woods comprising Sumter National Forest. The resulting book, Settling the South Carolina Backcountry, celebrates the first few generations of Pressly and Hearst family members who embraced the value of education and a deep, intellectual understanding of the scriptures and who were to influence profoundly generations of Presslys to come. It also honors the author’s adored father-in-law, Dr. William Laurens Pressly, founder and former president of Westminster Schools in Atlanta, whose life embraced a love of family and the learned and sacred conversation so essential to his ancestors.

In 2012, Nancy and her husband, William Pressly, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland at College Park, moved from Washington, DC, to Atlanta to be with their son and grandchildren. They travel extensively, most recently to Costa Rica, Ireland, and Morocco, and share a passion for collecting not only works of art, but also natural objects gathered on long walks. For relaxation, Nancy is a devoted gardener, cook, and adoring grandmother.