From 1971 to 1972, she studied journalism at New York University. Upon enrolling at the Pratt Institute, she became increasingly aware of the lack of Black photojournalists working at major news publications. In the following years, she took freelance photographs for the Village Voice. In 1977, while still a student at Pratt, she applied to show her photography at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in Lagos, Nigeria. Due to budget cuts, she was unable to present her work and instead traveled to the festival as a photo technician.

At twenty-three years old, Nance documented the month-long FESTAC event through over fifteen hundred images. She was part of a delegation of over four hundred African Americans who traveled to Lagos together in what she called a “symbolic reversal of the transatlantic slave trade.”[1] She created one of the largest photographic records of the event, studying the celebration of Pan-Africanism and creation of community across national lines. The experience affirmed her commitment to the aims of the Black Arts movement. She went on to cover subjects such as anti-apartheid rallies in New York and Black spiritual cultures across the United States, and completed a residency at the Studio Museum from 1993 to 1994. She has pioneered digital spaces and storytelling practices, developing an Ifa divination web application and supporting a web-based project at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Nance earned her BFA from the Pratt Institute and MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. She has received support from the New York State Council of the Arts (1987) and New York Foundation for the Arts (1993, 1989, 2000). The Studio Museum presented her work in exhibitions such as The Black Photographers Annual (1976); Home: Contemporary Urban Images by Black Photographers (1990); and Harlem Postcards: Winter 2018 (2018).