Nancy Alden Wall, who designs and writes under the name Nancy Alden, is co-founder of the Beadworks Group, one of world’s larger retailers of beads.
As Beadworks’ principal buyer and designer, she has traveled the world in search of the most beautiful components for jewelry design.
She is equally at home with gemstone merchants in Jaipur, silver makers in Bali, glass artists in Bohemia and pearl producers in China. Her knowledge of beads and findings is unrivalled, spanning all categories of material and all stages of production from the creation of a single bead to its final role in a finished piece of jewelry.

Starting as a silver and goldsmith, Nancy turned to designing with beads because of the vastly greater possibilities for creative expression. Having seen the world of jewelry design open for herself, she then went on to introduce other people to the creative pleasures and the economies of making their own jewelry. By creating Beadworks’ original classes and teaching her skills to other instructors, she has generated a network of lessons which have added to the ever-growing number of women and men able to design and create jewelry.

In her books, Simply Pearls and Simply Silver, Simply Gold, she shares her design and production techniques in a fully comprehensive and easy to follow guides, enabling an even wider audience to make their own attractive necklaces, earrings and bracelets.

Many of Nancy’s designs are custom created on commission. Having access to an astonishing palette of material, her work ranges from light, playful designs of glass and semi-precious stone to seriously elegant compositions of pearls and diamonds. A limited selection of her jewelry is now available for purchase online.
When she is not in search of new beads, Nancy divides her time between her home in Connecticut and studio retreats in Europe and the Grenadines.