Nancy Spector received her M.Phil. in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where she has organized exhibitions on conceptual photography, Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle, and Richard Prince. She co-organized Moving Pictures and Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated). She was one of the curators of Monument to Now, an exhibition of the Dakis Joannou Collection, which premiered in Athens as part of the Olympics program.

Spector was Adjunct Curator of the 1997 Venice Biennale and co-organizer of the first Berlin Biennial in 1998. In 2007 she was the U.S. Commissioner for the Venice Biennale, where she presented an exhibition of work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Under the auspices of the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, she has initiated special commissions by Andreas Slominski, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Lawrence Weiner, as well as a special exhibition on the work of Joseph Beuys and Matthew Barney.

Spector has also contributed to numerous books on contemporary visual culture with essays on artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Luc Tuymans, Douglas Gordon, Tino Sehgal, and Anna Gaskell. She is a regular columnist for Frieze magazine.

Spector is a recipient of the Peter Norton Family Foundation Curators Award. She has most recently organized an exhibition of work by Tino Sehgal for the 50th Anniversary of the New York Guggenheim Museum.