Nancy Maybin Ferguson entered the Philadelphia School of Design for Women at the age of 19. For the next twenty years she attended art school, both at PSDW as well as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, taking many varied courses and winning numerous fellowships for travel abroad as well as study at home. At PSDW she studied with, among others, Elliot Daingerfield, whom she credited for his particular influence on her artistic life. At the Academy Brooks studied with academic realists Charles Hawthorne and William Merritt Chase at, Philadelphia, in 1902 - 03 and 1907 - 12. By the 1920s, Ferguson had gravitated toward the fauvist-inspired work of Arthur Carles and other modernists active at the Academy, including Hugh Breckenridge.

Ferguson was an active member of the Philadelphia Ten from 1923 - 1927, and again from 1930 through 1938. She won numerous fellowships and awards from both the PSDW and the PAFA, including the prestigious Cresson Fellowship. During her extensive career Nancy Maybin Ferguson exhibited throughout the country, including at the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; National Academy of Design, New York City; Buffalo Fine Arts Museum, New York; and Philadelphia Men's Club, where she received a gold medal. She also exhibited her paintings from 1914 through 1945 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and in 1949 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

Ferguson was a plein-air painter known for her colorful townscapes, street scenes and genre depictions of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Provincetown, Massachusetts. She lived in the Germantown area of Philadelphia and summered most of her adult life in Provincetown, where she first went to study with Daingerfield as a young artist. She was considered by some to be a modernist before the movement took hold in America. Some paintings are impressionistic while others are cubist; each are distinct.