Jean Cappadonna Nichols was born January 18, 1941, in Port Arthur, Texas, to first generation Italian-American parents. At the age of seven, her family moved to the small, west Texas town of Midland, where she attended elementary, junior high and high school. Upon graduating from high school, she attended Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. After two years, she transferred to Loretto Heights College in Denver, Colorado, to be geographically closer to her high school sweetheart and future husband, Larry Nichols. Larry graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in June 1962 and they married the following September.

After rearing three daughters, Stephanie, Michelle, and Phyllis, Jean decided to return to Texas Tech to complete her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree, which she accomplished in 1988. Armed with a degree in drawing but with a desire to move into the realm of three-dimension, Jean began working in clay but felt she needed additional education to accelerate her progress. In 1994, that opportunity was realized when her husband decided to sell his business, attend law school at the University of Mississippi and ultimately join their middle daughter, Michelle, in her and her husband's small firm in Tupelo, Mississippi. Therefore, in the Spring of 1994, Jean was accepted into the Sculpture program at The University of Mississippi, Oxford. After a few semesters in the Sculpture program, Jean changed her area of concentration to ceramics in order to focus on the technical aspects of the medium. She graduated in 1996 with a Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics.

After graduation, Jean and her husband moved to Tupelo, Mississippi, where she worked full-time as a studio artist. In March 1999, Jean and Larry decided to make a permanent move to Fort Myers, Florida to indulge themselves in a few additional passions: year-round gardening, sunshine and water. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions as well as solo and two person shows, and has received many awards and honors, the most recent being the 2003 Individual Artist Award in Sculpture from the Florida Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs. She was also the 2002 recipient of the Heritage of Odessa Foundation Distinguished Former Odessan Award, and the 1999 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Visual Arts. This latter award has been presented to such notables as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and John Grisham.

Her work has been published in The Best of New Ceramic Art, The Ceramic Design Book, Clay Times Magazine, Daniel Rhodes Clay and Glazes for the Potter, Edition III and the recently released, Working With Clay, Edition II, by Susan Peterson. She was featured in the March-April 1999 issue of Clay Times and the February 2000 issue of Ceramics Monthly Magazine. Jean works as a full-time studio artist in Fort Myers and her work is represented by Carol Robinson Gallery, New Orleans.