Nance has been featured in Time Magazine, the Utne Reader, the Chicago Tribune, Reuters news service, on the MSN Money website, and many other publications and media outlets. She has been interviewed extensively about her work including spots by American Public Media’s Weekend America program, KRCL in Salt Lake City, BBC Radio Canada, Chicago Public Radio, and KBOO in Portland, Oregon.

Chicago’s Pacific Garden Mission (PGM), one of the largest shelters for the homeless in the United States, serves an average of 800 residents and visitors per day, resulting in hundreds of pounds of food waste each week. Nance was called upon in 2005, when Pacific Garden was interested in creating a new facility with sustainability in mind. She designed, help to build, and spent five years managing the Greenhouses of Hope – a large scale, closed-loop vermicompost and farming project that trains residents of the shelter on horticulture, gardening, and composting techniques and tools.

She is the bioinstigator-in-residence at the Center for Land Interpretation’s off-the-grid site in the desert outside of Wendover, Utah. Since 2007, Nance has worked with post-consumer materials (including solid and liquid human waste, grey water from sinks and showers, food, yard waste, manure, and cardboard) and transformed these materials into biologically rich soil (using decomposition, filtering, and fermentation). The resulting waste-sponge soil systems sustain a habitat of edible and medicinal plants, digestion of soil salinity, and the capturing, storing and use of precipitation.

Nance has lectured recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the University of Cincinnati, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. She has taught at the University of California – Los Angeles, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and Dartington College in the United Kingdom, as well as for countless community groups worldwide. She writes a regular column for Arthur magazine. In addition, Nance was included in the books Radical Homemakers (by Shannon Hayes), Participatory Autonomy (edited by Rick Gribenas), and The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements (by Sandor Katz).

Nance earned a B.A. in Archaeology and Spanish Literature from the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., followed by graduate work in Education Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has continued her education in a variety of ways, from intensive cheesemaking training on a sheep farm outside of Brattleboro, Vermont, to studying with David Holmgren (the co-originator, with Bill Mollison, of the concept of Permaculture). She worked with Martin Crawford of the Agroforestry Research Trust of Devon, England, took herbal apprenticeships in Wisconsin, and herbal study at the East West College of Herbalism in California.

She lives and grows in the middle of Little Village, a densely packed, diverse urban neighborhood in the heart of Chicago. Her house and land are daily practice in permaculture and urban living. She has worked with chickens, quails, rabbits, fish, and dairy animals. Nance is bilingual in Spanish and English, understands basic French, is a canner, a preserver, practices yoga and meditation, has traveled the world, and can be totally hilarious.