Nancy Callan

Lives and works in Seattle, Washington, USA 

Nancy Callan borrows her wondrous designs from nature: a spider's web, the vein of a leaf, the texture of ice... Observing these delicate fragments connects her deeply to the elemental forces of life. Callan sees herself as a collector of visual data, which she transcribes into glass language. Every detail can become a path of exploration in its own right, and the finished work is often far beyond its original source of inspiration.

Trained in Venetian glassmaking traditions, Callan develops her own language from the vocabulary formed by historic glass processes such as cane, incalmo and murrine.

Callan studied at the Massachusetts College of Art in the Northwest. She is also a key member of maestro Lino Tagliapietra's team of glassblowers.
She has received numerous awards, including the Creative Glass Center of America Fellowship, and has held residencies at prestigious venues such as the Museum of Glass (Tacoma, WA), the Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, OH), the Pittsburgh Glass Center (Pittsburgh, PA) and the Chrysler Museum (Norfolk, VA). She has organized advanced glassblowing workshops at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, WA, Pittsburgh Glass Center, Haystack Mountain School in Deer Isle, ME and Penland School of Crafts in Ashville, NC.

Permanent collections
Shanghai Museum of Art, Shanghai, China,
Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington,
Corning Museum of Glass, New York,
Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, Michigan,
Museum of Northwest Art, La Connor, Washington,
and numerous private collections.