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.”