Gail Nathan was born and raised in the Bronx and attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art. She received a BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She is a Fellow of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program (ISP), the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art, Norfolk, CT  and the J. Paul Getty Museum Leadership Institute (MLI) in California.

Nathan settled in Soho in the late 1960s focusing on painting as her primary media while she continued to work in printmaking, photography and ceramics. By the mid 1970s she had produced her first mature body of large-scale, hard-edged, abstract paintings and exhibited them at galleries and non-profit art spaces throughout the New York Metro area. During this time she supported herself through adjunct teaching positions in New York and New Jersey, teaching painting, printmaking, color theory and photography at the Steinhardt School of the Arts at New York University; Parsons School of Design; Montclair State University, School of Art and Design; The School of Contemporary Art at Ramapo College; and Douglass College of Rutgers University.

 From 1980 - ‘98, Nathan traveled extensively as a visiting artist to Colleges and Universities throughout the U.S. where she taught undergraduate and graduate painting, drawing and contemporary issues at: The School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University; Maryland Institute, College of Art; Kansas City Art Institute; Philadelphia College of Art and Design; the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University; Departments of Art at California State University, Chico; University of Kentucky, Lexington; University of North Carolina, Greenville; University of Tennessee, Knoxville; and in Eastern Europe at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia. 

While away from NYC Nathan evolved her art practice in a new direction, that of large-scale, barbed-Pop-figurative paintings which addressed the realities and complexity of human relationships through everyday scenes and emotions. All the while she maintained her commitment to the primary concerns of picture-making — color, light, space, composition, and scale — through which she pushed the picture space into the viewer’s space to achieve a humanistic, emotional connection. 

During this time she established a significant public career, exhibited extensively in group and solo exhibitions throughout the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast regions, including solo installations at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; the Southeastern Center for the Creative Arts in Winston -Salem, NC; 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA, The Tilden Foley, Res Nova and Arthur Rogers galleries in New Orleans, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, where she was included in the 1998 Triennial of Contemporary American Art. Her paintings are included in public, corporate, and private collections throughout the US including: the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Frederick Weisman Collection, the Business School of VCU, the Medical College of Virginia and the 42nd St. Library print collection in NYC.  Nathan has also  produced several public art commissions for the cities of Richmond, VA, New Orleans, LA, and The Bronx, NY.

Over her long career Nathan has received numerous honours, grants and artist residencies. Outstanding among them are a Virginia Museum Professional Fellowship, and an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant for over 20 years of mature work. Artist Residencies include: The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts VA; the Schoharie County Arts Council and  Art Awareness in New York State; and the Karolyi Foundation for Artists and Writers in Vence, France. 

In 1999 she returned to NYC (and the Bronx) to become Executive Director of the Bronx River Art Center, which she held through 2024 expanding its programs and seeing it through a $15,000,000 renovation. During this time, she returned to painting abstractly, now incorporating collage and gestural brushwork influenced by her immediate natural surroundings in the North Bronx — The Bronx River, The New York Botanical Garden and City Island, where she currently resides and maintains a studio. 

Nathan has always viewed herself as a “citizen artist”, acknowledging the artist’s responsibility to engage with the community by sharing her knowledge and love of art. Other positions that supported her artmaking career while serving communities was as Director of Public Relations and Marketing for the Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1976 -79;  Public Art Manager for the City of Richmond, Virginia; 1993-97; and as a peer panelist for the US General Services Administration Public Art program, Southeast region,1997- 98.