Nicole was born in Verdun, France in 1965 where her father was stationed as an army psychiatrist; she grew up in New York with her parents and two brothers and studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1987.
Her many awards and accolades include the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), The Carnegie Prize (2013), the MacArthur Fellowship ‘Genius Grant’ (2015) and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and has two children.