Kelli Nelson is a Minneapolis-based painter and educator. A Grand Forks native, Nelson earned her BFA in painting from the University of North Dakota in 2010. In the spring of 2013 she completed her MFA, concentrating of drawing and painting, at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Currently, she teaches drawing and painting at the Minnetonka Center for the Arts. Nelson’s work always starts with the body.

Figurative forms emerge and are obliterated from a process of overlapping gestural lines and erasure, making it unclear where one figure ends and another begins. As the individual bodies coalesce with each other and their ground they lose some or all of their identity, creating images resting precariously on the threshold between figuration and abstraction.