Emily Velez Nelms

Emily Velez Nelms's picture
Masters of Environmental Design, Yale School of Architecture ‘24
emily.nelms@yale.edu

Bio / Emily Velez Nelms (she/her) is a visual artist and educator born and raised in southern Florida. 

Velez Nelms’ work engages with Indigenous methodologies, archive formation, and theories of racial formation. Currently, she is studying the impact cultural tourism has had on the infrastructural development of southern Florida, through the lens of Indigenous Sovereignty, entertainment, and institutional collection making. 

Velez Nelms has been a resident artist at the International Sculpture Center, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts & Media, MASS MoCA, and a 2023 - 2024 Whitney ISP Studio Participant. 

Velez Nelms teaches in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at University of Hartford. 

From 2022 - 2024 she served as the graduate coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. 

She studied painting at Savannah College of Art and Design (BFA 2013) and sculpture at the University of California Los Angeles (MFA 2019). Velez Nelms has also engaged in the formal study of architecture at the University of Miami.