Artist Bio
Born in London, England, raised on a 1,000-acre farm in Missouri, Nina Nelson modeled and acted in NYC, before moving to CT with her family. She got her first camera when she was 11 years-old and won a blue ribbon at the county fair for photos of her pigs. In high school, she was on the yearbook staff and her college work-study was mixing development chemicals and checking IDs for the darkroom. While pregnant with her son, she didn’t look pregnant enough to book any pregnancy modeling gigs, so she turned to her other love—writing. Her manuscript won the Ursula Nordstrom Fiction Contest and was published by HarperCollins under the name N.A. Nelson. While struggling with her second book, she got her Masters in Creative Writing for Children and Young Adults at VCFA. Her other, otherlove is vintage. The neglected Etsy store, The Vintage Bundt Cake is where she sells her finds, and uses her Master’s degree to write imagined backstories for each item. Acting, modeling, writing, vintage thrifting, photography—it all comes back to storytelling.
Artist Statement
Nina Nelson’s work seeks to bridge the gap between portraiture and social narrative. With careful staging and an eye for character, her photographs transform vintage items and found settings into portals of imagined histories. Each garment and backdrop becomes a vessel for untold stories. Nelson stars in these stories, weaving herself into roles that blur fact and fiction. Her photographs invite the viewer to linger, to look closer and to piece together the fragments of memory and place. In her work, every image is both performance and possi