Dennis Nolan was born in San Francisco, California, and educated in Bay Area schools earning undergraduate degrees in both Painting and Art History, and a graduate degree in Painting from San Jose State University. He has taught at a number of schools including the College of San Mateo, San Jose State University, and the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford in Connecticut.  At Hartford he wrote the curriculum for the newly initiated Illustration program where he taught for thirty years as a tenured faculty member earning the rank of Full Professor.  Retired from undergraduate teaching, he is Professor Emeritus of the Hartford Art School and currently teaches in Hartford’s Low Residency MFA in Illustration program as one of a team teaching duo launching the Thesis Project. 

He has illustrated over thirty books, ten of those as the author, and is the recipient of a number of awards, including both the SCBWI Golden Kite Honor Award for his book Dinosaur Dream, and the SCBWI Golden Kite Award for the book Fairy Wings, which he shares with his wife, author and illustrator, Lauren Mills.  His books include two retellings of William Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’ Dream, and Romeo and Juliet, both written in prose by Bruce Coville, the T. H. White classic tale of the boyhood of King Arthur, in The Sword in the Stone, a biography of St. Francis, in St. Francis of Assisi, A Life of Joy, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, in Wings, by Jane Yolen.  Picture books he has both written and illustrated include Sea of Dreams, which received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, and was chosen as one of Publisher’s Weekly Top Ten Best Books of the Year, and Hunters of the Great Forest, which received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, and was chosen as one of School Library Journal Best Books of the Year.  His most recent picture book, Dinosaur Feathers, received starred reviews from Booklist, School Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews, and was named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Books for 2019.

His paintings have been selected for inclusion in a number of Spectrum Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art Annuals and his drawings have been awarded both first place and honorable mention awards in the Art Renewal Center International ARC Salons. 

He authored the two hundred and sixteen page catalogue for the Keepers of the Flame, Parrish, Wyeth, Rockwell and the Narrative Tradition, to accompany an exhibition he conceived and organized as a guest curator for the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 2018.  The exhibition displayed seventy five paintings tracing the history of three masters of the American Golden Age of Illustration, Maxfield Parrish, N. C. Wyeth, and Norman Rockwell, and their teachers, and their teachers in turn, revealing a direct, unbroken line of students and teachers reaching back to the very beginnings of western painting in the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth century.