Ms. Nancy Knechtel

Biography

Ms. Nancy Knechtel is an adjunct professor of art history in the Theatre and Fine Arts Department at Niagara University. She joined Niagara County Community College’s (NCCC) faculty in 1989 after receiving a graduate assistantship in the art history department at the University at Buffalo. She currently teaches a variety of art history courses in the Arts, Media and Technology division. Recently she studied Dutch painting at the Mauritshuis, the Rijksmuseum and the private collection of Baron Jan Six in the Netherlands.

She has received two awards from the National Endowment of the Humanities to attend Workshops for Community College faculty on “Georgia O’Keeffe: Santa Fe, Abiquiu, and the New Mexico Landscape” on “Building the New South” at Elon University. Nancy has had articles published on teaching art history in the Art Journal and worked on several books on Frank Lloyd Wright with authors Brendan Gill and Jack Quinan. She is speaking on how Paris and the Louvre survived World War II for NCCC’s “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat:” A Conference on the Second World War in April.

Nancy has worked as photo researcher for several documentaries including Glorious Battle: Siege of Fort Erie. WNED TV and Elbert Hubbard: An American Original broadcast nationally on the American Experience series on PBS. She loves to travel, take photographs, collect movie art and make dollhouse miniatures.

Current Research

• Researcher for PBS documentary Glorious Battle: Siege of Fort Erie. WNED TV, Buffalo, NY.
• Researcher for PBS documentary Elbert Hubbard: An American Original. WNED TV, Buffalo, NY. Broadcast nationally on the American Experience series.
• Contributing writer, entries on architect Louise Blanchard Bethune, painters Thomas Cole, John Vanderlyn, and John Frederick Kensett and the Guaranty Building in Buffalo by Louis Sullivan. Encyclopedia of New York State, Syracuse University Press, 2005.
• “Writing Yourself Into History” Art Journal Fall 1995.
• Contributing writer, Encyclopedia of North American Women Artists in the Twentieth Century. Garland Publishing co., 1995.
• Assisted with research and acknowledged in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House: Architecture as Portraiture; by Jack Quinan, Many Masks by Brendan Gill, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building : myth and fact by Jack Quinan, and Romanesque Sculpture in Campania by Dorothy Glass.

Current Involvement

• College Art Association

Education Background

• Bachelors of Arts in English Literature. State University College at Buffalo
• Masters of Humanities in Art History and Italian. State University of New York at Buffalo