Jennifer Nelson

CONTACT INFO

EDUCATION

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 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.  Her most recent project, Waste (Inheritance),  was featured in a 6-month participatory performance and film project at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens ΕΜΣΤ. Nelson was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003. Her work was recently purchased for the collection of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens.

She frequently collaborates with artists, experts from diverse other disciplines (chemistry, Special Weapons And Tactics, music therapy, permaculture) and with underserved communities. She is a co-founder of the Guerrilla Optimists, an improvisatory, urban intervention art collective. She has also worked in collaboration 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, extends throughout her practice as 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 film about environmental grief, produced by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, with additional support from The American College of Greece.

Awards 

Artist in residence–Grand Central Art Center, Cal State University Fullerton, 2019  Andy Warhol Grant awarded to the Arizona State University Museum “Social Studies” Artist Residence Program for 3 artist projects that include Nelson’s Securing a Free State: The Second Amendment, 2011

Guggenheim Fellow for Visual Arts, 2003

Artist in residence- Stiftung Laurenz-Haus, Basel, Switzerland, 2003