Jennifer Nelson

CONTACT INFO

EDUCATION

Research Area: Experimental Arts

RTIN’s Experimental Arts research area focuses on artistic form-finding at the intersection of art, social sciences, politics, ecology and new technologies. It welcomes art research that transcends disciplinary categories or shifts narratives, problems and paradigms for art production and reception. Involved areas range from holistic, systems-based explorations connecting art with social and ecological contexts, the transformation of cultural experiences through new technology as well as the incorporation of new technologies within traditional disciplines, art inquiries that expand beyond a human-centered sensory range or aesthetic expectations, and art that addresses existential and/or moral well-being for diverse audiences and practitioners. The Experimental Arts research area centers around disciplines originating within the Francis Rich School of Fine and Performing Arts and Cinema Studies, with the expectation that projects will locate original points of intersection with other disciplines in order to generate new knowledge, experience and prototypes.

Biography

Jennifer Nelson co-developed the Visual Arts program at the American College of Greece, writing many of its founding and validated curricula. Her broadly applicable, experimental and interdisciplinary approach has also made her classes a requirement within multiple departments within the College. She recently served as a curricular advisor for the new Cinema Studies Program. Her classes dealing with audio-visual and new media look at technology holistically, exploring new expressive paradigms with an eye to the long-term impact on human culture and the environment.

Nelson danced with the Feld Ballet in New York and the Ballet du Grand Théatre in Geneva, Switzerland, and studied New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute and at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she received her MFA.  She has exhibited in museums and festivals in the Americas, Europe and Asia, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Kunsthalle Duesseldorf, Museo MADRE in Naples, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, and the Galerie Nasional in Jakarta.  She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003. She frequently collaborates with artists, experts from other disciplines (chemistry, Special Weapons And Tactics, music therapy, permaculture) and underserved communities. She is a co-founder of the Guerrilla Optimists, an improvisatory, urban intervention art collective. She has also collaborated with men from the Second Chance School in Korydallos prison and with residents at Nestor 1^st Psychogeriatric Boarding House of Athens, both with the National Museum of Contemporary Art’s educational program EMST without borders. In Nelson’s cross-disciplinary artistic practice, she is committed to the playful realignment of social spaces through collective initiative and to the transformative possibilities of the individual act. Her deep-rooted interest in co-creation and its political, aesthetic, and social possibilities extend throughout her practice as an artist and teacher. Among many influences, her work has been significantly shaped by her direct personal experience with disruptive or transitional world choreographies. Having lived and worked in multiple countries, she has a lived understanding of fragile resources, natural and human, and the global sculptural flow of power and matter. These global flows must be linked and translated to a bodily scale for ethical action to begin. She is currently working on a project commissioned by the Goethe Institute Athen, in collaboration with her colleague Tim Ward, on an environmental film and workshop with a children’s choir to explore the legal voice of lifeforms within the ecosystem of Mt. Hymettus.