Nancy du Plessis's award-winning first documentary, Future Remembrance: Photography and Image Arts in Ghana (with Tobias Wendl, 1998), focused on the realistic painted backdrops used in Ghanaian photo studios. Opening her own production company in 1999, she produced, directed and wrote If These Walls Could Speak! Mural Painting in Belfast (2001), which received the Prix Arts de la rue in the XXVIe Festival international du film d'art.

du Plessis studied performing arts at Northwestern University and New York’s Circle-in-the Square Theatre School, urban design and journalism at New York University and theater anthropology at the University of Paris. She has performed at theater and poetry festivals, art centers and universities in North America, Europe and Africa. Her articles, poems and performance texts have been published in World Literature Today, Playbill, Women in Performance, La Tribune internationale de langues vivantes and DOX (the magazine of the European Documentary Network). Notes from the Moroccan Journals and Art New York, her most-performed solo performances, were published in a bilingual edition by L'Harmattan (Paris, 1995). She has taught acting at the University of Paris and Münchner Schauspiel Studio and her voice narrates films and guides luxury-car drivers, museum visitors and Swiss telebankers, among others. Since 1985, she has traveled widely from her home in New York performing, teaching and making documentaries.