TEACHING | Nina Elder

TEACHING

ongoing

Nina leads workshops, educational courses, and curated excursions. Ranging from one hour to one semester, Nina travels to institutions across the globe to facilitate interdisciplinary learning. Participants are fostered to trust their curiosity and hone their attention. Nina’s courses often incorporate elements of experiential education, somatic practice, and intuitive process. Nina has created programs for all ages, as well as college pedagogy within Landscape Architecture, Sustainability, Creative Writing, and Studio Arts.

Many of Nina's academic engagements result in projects, zines, exhibitions, and other creative products that are developed with and for students.

TALKS
LEARNING LABS
fieldwork
ZINEs
PROJECTS
TEACHING

TALKS 2015-ongoing

Nina shares her work through evolving presentations that art critic and author Lucy Lippard has called “something that embodies a social energy not yet defined as art.” These performative lectures are equal parts artist talk, research inquiry, and poetic narrative. Constantly changing to address current events, new science, and evolving projects, Nina's talks weave together unlikely associations between piles of rocks, Nina’s father’s untold military history, climate change, Native cultures, obsolete communication technology, and the need for curiosity. Nina travels globally to give presentations at universities, arts organizations, and federal research laboratories. For booking information, please email nina@ninaelder.com

SOLASTALGIC ARCHIVE 2019-ongoing

Solastalgia is the premonition of transition, a sense of loss from an anticipated future. It is the feeling of homesickness before leaving home. The Solastalgic Archive holds materials that contextualize and give breadth to the experience of living and making in this time of accelerated change. It contains ephemera of memory, creation, forgetting, destruction, preciousness and transience from a wide range of contributors. It began in 2019 and has been growing and changing as it travels. Learn more about the archive.

SOLASTALGIA 2023

This 100 page accordion book was created through a series of workshops at Reed College. Focusing on stream of consciousness writing and repetitive mark making, students were asked to respond to solastalgia - what they cherish now, what they might miss in the future, and what they hope will endure.

CRATER DOME 2023

Crater and Dome is a special artist zine. Exploring optical illusions, inversions, erosion, and reciprocity, it is a celebration of teaching, learning, and changing. Made in collaboration with christina martin at the PNCA Pub Lab, this limited edition zine includes text, grasses, geologic samples, and a gesture of gratitude.

OVER LOOK BOOK 2022

This zine is one of the projects that emerged from Overlook Field School: 2022, a month-long field course for University of Oregon Landscape Architecture students. “Every place is evidence of transformation, less, reliance, and renewal. Every thing is a legacy of disruption and creation. Every moment constitutes equal parts undoing and emergence. This book is intended to help ou connect to change. Through exercises, prompts, and invitations that can be done by anyone, anywhere, this is a field guide to your dynamic environment.”

try to eat the universe 2022

Resulting from Embodied Research and Alternative Documentation, an MFA level course at University of Nevada, this zine is a collective publication to help readers better connect with their fleeting sensory reality.

DEEP TIME LAB 2018-2019

Deep Time Lab merged the forms of exhibition, pedagogy, and archive, orienting participants to Earth’s new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene. Deep Time Lab sought new connections between past, present, and potential futures, by exploring time as a language, a measure, an art medium, a social context, a scientific principle, a spiritual space, and a cultural expression. Designed and facilitated by Nina Elder, the Lab was a platform for interdisciplinary activity and is adaptable to various academic and non-academic contexts within the University of New Mexico.

tHIS PLACE 2016

This Place is a limited edition book created with students, faculty, and staff of Grinnell College. For one afternoon, participants from Creative Writing, Religious Studies, Earth Sciences and Studio Art came together to explore old growth prairies at the Conard Environmental Research Area. The multisensory observations and data were coalesced in the book by Nina Elder with support from Center for Prairie Studies.

teaching engagements

University of Nevada Reno, Interdisciplinary MFA

2024 - Reverences: Making Intuitive Monuments
2021 - Embodied Practice: Sensory Research and Alternative Documentation
2020 - Focused Studio Practice: Forests, Fires, and Futures
2020 - present: focused one-on-one mentorship throughout semester with MFA students as they prepare for their midway thesis exhibition

Colorado College

2023 - Non-Human Navigation (short field course)
2022 - Advanced Studio: Collage and the Archives

Wild Rockies Field Institute

2024 - Southwest Southwest Climate Studio Art: Change and Resilience in the American Southwest (month-long field school, 3 credits in environmental science, 3 credits in studio art)

University of Oregon, Fuller Institute for Productive Landscapes, School of Architecture and Design

2022 - Transpecies Design and Empathy, Overlook Field School Lead Faculty (6 credit field school intensive held at the Fuller Estate in Pennsylvania)

Recent Pedagogic Interactions (2-3 class sessions including assignment and assessment)