Nancy Patz, a Baltimore-born artist, teacher, lecturer, author, and illustrator, has dedicated her professional life to writing, entertaining, inspiring, and educating young minds.  Her numerous popular books for children are distinguished by rhythmic text and rich illustrations.

In addition to her lively, colorful picture books, she is perhaps best-known for Who Was the Woman Who Wore the Hat?  This book, a meditation on a woman's hat on display in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, combines Nancy's pensive prose poem with her arresting collage artwork of pencil drawings, subdued watercolors, and old photographs.  Historical and personal, this story brings the reality of the Holocaust into sharp focus through an unknown woman's hat.

Who Was the Woman Who Wore the Hat? was awarded the prestigious gold medal as the winner of the 2003 Sydney Taylor Book Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries.

Building on her professional success and personal satisfaction of highlighting Holocaust artifacts as an educational tool, Nancy has created the covers and five pages of art for the 2014 issue of PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators.  Her work consists of more than 125 small pen and ink, pencil, and watercolor drawings of authentic Holocaust artifacts from the Holocaust museums in Washington, D.C., Jerusalem, Houston, and New York, and the Jewish Museum of Maryland in Baltimore. 

She also commissioned a video to further explore the drawings, edited by Peter Bruun, a well-known Baltimore artist, Michael Curry, Department Chair of the Goucher College Theatre Department, and Joshua Blinder of the United States Holocaust Museum.  Nancy's script, which conveys the powerful histories behind these artifacts, is narrated in the video by Goucher students and faculty, while music composed by a Goucher student accompanies the words and images.

View the The Artifacts Drawings video about their creation.

 View information about the Nancy Patz Collection at Goucher College.