Mary Nees is a practicing artist, residing in the Appalachian highlands. She has been an adjunct faculty member of the Department of Art and Design at East Tennessee State University. She trained at Cornell University, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and earned her MFA in 2007 at ETSU.

Her work is abstracted from landscape, rooted in a personal visual vocabulary exploring themes of mortality, the fragility of time and position, brokenness and Biblical hope. Mary also teaches in an enrichment program for disadvantaged kids in Johnson City. 

She has won grants to Penland and Arrowmont, and was recently selected to display in Boston for the Monotype Guild of New England. Mary has led workshops and lectures at two universities in The People’s Republic of China. 

Mary’s work is in public and private collections nationally and internationally. She is primarily represented by the Whitestone Gallery in Philadelphia.