Emily Velez Nelms

upcoming

April 2–30, 2025 | Artist-in-Residence

Fountainhead Residency, Miami FL

current

Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship

Nominated Artist (Fellowship Forthcoming 2025)

April 4–December 2, 2024 | Solo Exhibition

Resonance of Things Unseen: Indigenous Sovereignty, Institutional Accession, and Private Correspondence

Yale Peabody Museum

November 8–January 30, 2025 | Group Exhibition

[HYPERTEXT](HYPERLINK)

ISOVIST Gallery, Yale Center for Collaborative Arts & Media

recent past

May 9, 2024

At Odds With

Whitney ISP Westbeth Exhibition

Emily Velez Nelms is interested in an array of methods and mediums, including installation, film, sound, and architectural processes.

Her work dissects mechanisms of voyerism, making gestures that subvert, contend with, and acknowledge the gaze of the viewer. She considers how social structures, coupled with a desirous gaze, shape spatial realities and infrastructure. She avoids disciplinary bounds.

During her Masters of Environmental Design at the Yale School of Architecture, she is developed ‘Domestic Exotic’, a critical examination of the impact cultural tourism on the urban development of her home, southern Florida. Using Florida as a case study, she explores a history of racial performance and its ties tourism sites like the Hard Rock Casino chain and Disney’s Epcot.

Velez Nelms has been a Studio Fellow at Whitney Independent Study Program (2024), Artist-in-Residence at Skowhegan (2018), MASS MoCA (2023), the International Sculpture Center (2016). She recently served as the coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. She was nominated as a 2025 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. Velez Nelms holds an MFA from UCLA (2019).

Contact: emily.nelms@yale.edu