Ardine Nelson

Ardine Nelson is a professor of photography at Ohio State University. She was born in Chicago, and received her B.A. and her M.A. from Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, and her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Ms. Nelson worked with Polaroid materials early on in her career, and her work has been included in national and international Polaroid collections. She is well known for her work using alternative types of cameras, and focuses on landscapes and the structure of space in her photographs.  Ms. Nelson has taught as a visiting artist in Spain and Slovakia in addition to her many years on the faculty at Ohio State University. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Photo Media Center in Philadelphia, the Ohio State Fair, several National Aperture exhibitions in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the Kunsthaus Raskolnikow Galerie in Dresden, and at Kalamoon University in Damascus. 

Ms. Nelson has been honored with several awards, including artist fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She has received forty-five awards from juried exhibitions since beginning exhibiting her work in 1977.   Her work can be found in the collections of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Photography Collection at Columbia College in Chicago, the University of Michigan Art Collection in Ann Arbor, the International Polaroid Collection in Amsterdam, and the Ithaca University Art Collection in Ithaca, New York, among others. 

Ms. Nelson received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her work on her project Green Spaces: Small Garden Communities of Dresden, Germany. Ms. Nelson has spent several summers in Dresden working on a visual research project on the city’s garden communities. In addition to visually exploring the lush gardens in her photographs, Ms. Nelson has conducted interviews and researched the social history of these gardens to reveal the individual style and approach of each gardener. Ms. Nelson’s work includes portraits of the gardeners and hours of interview on film, in addition to her photographs of the community gardens themselves. Her project will be exhibited in Dresden and Cincinnati, with plans to bring the exhibition to additional venues in the future.

Spouse: Fredrik Marsh, Guggenheim Fellow in Photography, 2008