Biographical Note
Nancy Sweezy, author, folklorist, raised in Concord, New Hampshire, studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. During World War II, she worked overseas in the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Her interest in craft began with pottery lessons in New England in the 1950s. She worked in partnership with Ralph Rinzler and helped manage Club 47 (now Club Passim) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she served as president of the board. She and Ralph, along with Norman Kennedy and others, formed Country Roads, Inc. in 1966 to support folk arts educational projects, research, and marketing. The group purchased the Jugtown Pottery in Seagrove, North Carolina, in 1968, and Sweezy moved to North Carolina to direct the operation and work with traditional potters in the area. In the 1980s in Boston, Nancy organized the Refugee Arts Group to encourage recent Southeast Asian and other immigrants to preserve and perpetuate craft, dance, and music traditions from their communities of origin. In the 1990s, Sweezy documented the traditional crafts of Armenia, making more than a dozen trips to the country. In 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts presented Nancy Sweezy with the Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellowship. She was born October 14, 1921, in Flushing, New York, and died February 6, 2010, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.