Nancy Graves grew up in the countryside and remembers visiting many art and natural history museums with her family. These childhood experiences had a notable impact on her later work. She received a degree in English Literature from Vassar College and a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. She was awarded a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship in 1965 to study painting in Paris. A year later, she moved to Florence, where she stopped painting and began making sculptures, having been inspired by the works of the eighteenth-century anatomist Susini, who created life-size anatomical forms of humans and animals in wax. In 1966 Graves moved back to the United States and settled in New York.