What do a stained glass artist, a blues singer in a local band and a marketing professional in the Terry College of Business have in common?
The answer is they’re all the same person: Nancy Byron. Her 8-to-5 job is at UGA on the first floor of Brooks Hall in a tidy office decorated with Terry College branded mugs, paperweights and candies. On the occasional weekend or evening she might be found singing “The Hellfire Cabaret” with her band, Mad Whiskey Grin. And when she has time, she makes custom stained glass windows and transoms in her home studio in Hull.
Byron said that her life is all about balance between her job, family and creative outlets.
“I like having a job that I’m continually learning and growing in. It feeds that professional business side of me. I like having my family, my husband and my children,” she said. “And then there are my personal creative outlets: stained glass, singing and performing. I just can’t function without that creative outlet. I need it to be happy.”
Her full-time job is working to brand the Terry College and make it more recognizable. She’s been a marketing professional since February, but has worked her way up throughout the last five years at Terry. She started as an administrative assistant, was promoted to administrative professional and was promoted again earlier this year. She also received the Terry Achievement Award in December.
Before coming to Terry, she started her own company, Athens Glass. That experience translated well to working at the business school, where she thrives on learning more about the business world.
She started her company after college when she took a stained glass class in Winder. She started producing custom-made stained glass. Instead of finding a pattern for a window, she uses her own sketches-so her creations are one-of-a-kind. She’s known for her detail work and likes to mix stained glassed with fused glass.
Her pieces have included windows depicting the family dog, more traditional pieces with roses, large church windows and an elaborate stained glass tree with confetti glass background and fused glass leaves. She’s even taught glass classes at the Oconee Cultural Arts Foundation in Watkinsville.
She helped restore the stained glass windows in the doors to the Georgia Theatre before the fire last year. And now she’s set to restore the stained glass on the front doors again and add large geometric stained glass windows for the second floor of the building.
Her singing is a relatively new pursuit.
She recalls singing while in her studio while piecing stained glass together. Her husband, Joel, (a guitar tech with Wide Spread Panic), heard her sing and told her she had a great voice. A co-worker’s band needed a vocalist and that’s how she got her start.
She didn’t know if she would like getting up in front of an audience, but when she did she said she had a great time and that singing was a lot of fun and performing is therapeutic.
For the past two years she’s been singing with slide-guitarist Frank Williams in Mad Whiskey Grin.
The duo describes their music as a mix of dark blues, acoustic, folk and experimental. They play a couple of shows a month, and will be appearing on WUGA’s It’s Friday! Aug. 27 at 4 p.m.
