Nancy Hellebrand was born in 1944 in Philadelphia, PA. She went to the University of Southern California and to Boston University and then received her B.A. in English Literature from Columbia University in 1971. She studied photography and film in college, later took a photography course with Alexey Brodovitch in New York and then studied privately with Bill Brandt in London for three years. Brodovitch and Brandt both influenced her deeply as did Lisette Model. She began working as a full time photographer in 1964 in a commercial photography studio in New York City.

Hellebrand was awarded both a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1984. Solo shows include The National Portrait Gallery in London; two exhibitions at Pace/MacGill, New York; the Morris Gallery at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia; the Paul Cava Gallery and the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia; and the Heidi Cho Gallery in New York. Group exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography in New York; Tate Britain in London; The National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; and the Southeast Museum of Photography in Florida. She has taught photography for more than 15 years, at Yale University; Parsons School of Art (now the New School), New York; and the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) and Bucks County Community College in PA.

Nancy Hellebrand's works are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of London, the Art Museum, Princeton University, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and other collections. There is a monograph of her early work, "Londoners at Home, Photographs by Nancy Hellebrand" (published by Lund Humphries, London, 1974) and she is included in other books and periodicals.

Nancy Hellebrand's work reflects a continued desire to simplify and refine her subject while simultaneously broadening her scope of inquiry. Over the years her photographs have become more abstracted as her interest has migrated toward the larger human experience rather than the personal or social circumstances that occupied her earlier years. She has never stopped shooting over the long years of her career, but she has taken time off from showing when she needed to find her way more clearly. Her recent work has evolved from her pictures of highly magnified handwriting taken in the late 1980's. She has photographed water, rocks and other landscape subjects in order to encompass more and more spiritual depth in her work. She has always lived and worked in urban areas but moved to a more natural setting in 2001.