Nancy Reid Gunn studied art at Rollins College, in Winter Park, Florida, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She moved to Tallahassee, Florida, in the early 1950s, where she studied with German-American artist Karl Zerbe (1902-1973) at Florida State University. Zerbe inspired and influenced her work, introducing her to the art of encaustic, a technique of painting with melted wax mixed with pigments. Using household objects (a broom handle, a space heater, an electric skillet), Gunn developed and refined her approach to the process that would dominate her output for the rest of her career. Pure color, applied abstractly, stimulated her creative process. As she developed a painting, images and symbols, often obscure, emerged from the abstraction. Living in Tallahassee, Nancy Reid Gunn earned a circle of devoted admirers of her work throughout the state and the region. The St. Petersburg Times described her work in a review: “Nancy Reid is as modern as tomorrow. . . yet she works in a medium as old as Egypt and as difficult and cumbersome as any invented. She paints in encaustic....Her work has great strength, unexpected for a small, blonde woman....It is brooding, tantalizing, challenging." The LeMoyne Art Foundation in Tallahassee holds a large collection of her work from the 1950s through the 1980s.