Nicole Chesney was born in Cinnaminson, New Jersey in 1971. She began her undergraduate studies at California College of Arts and Crafts and completed her BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art in 1997. In 2000, Nicole earned her Master’s degree from The Canberra School of Art in Canberra, Australia.

Awards received include a Jutta Cuny-Franz Foundation Supporting Award in Düsseldorf, Germany, the UrbanGlass Award for New Talent, and The Corning Museum of Glass Rakow Commission. She has also created large-scale, site-specific commissions including those at 7 World Trade Center, New York and Massachusetts College of Art, Boston.

Her work is exhibited and collected internationally including the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Palm Springs Art Museum, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Chesney is inspired by the writings of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard who once described himself, "not as a philosopher so much as a thinker who grants himself the right to dream." While Bachelard explores many types of dreams, he says, "the space in which we shall spend our nocturnal hours has no perspective, no distance. ...And the skies we soar through are wholly interior - skies of desire or hope..." Later, the reader is invited to "measure the distance between that which is seen and that which is dreamt."

Chesney's oil paintings on etched, mirrored glass explore the sources of "sky water" - the fog that hangs in the air and the clouds that drift through the sky. The literal moisture and humidity that gives water to the air also obscures the "mirror" of the sky. These elements, air and water, often join to create an infinite, seamless "unsilvered mirror" where the horizon ceases and the beyond continues.