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



The Resonance of Things Unseen, 2024



Apparatus, 2023



Sound Felt Through the Bones, 2023



Sheba, 2022–Ongoing



For Josephine, 2022



305.954.561, 2019



Towards a Referendum on Performativity, 2019



Who Is To Say Where Truth Ends and Fantasy Begins, 2019



Baptism of Abundance, 2018



Legitimation, 2018



(Untitled) Pink, 2018