Alumna Brittany Nelson Exhibits New Work at MIT List Visual Arts Center
Brittany Nelson, ‘Greenbank Telescope,’ 2025. Gelatin silver print, 50 × 60 in. (127 × 152.4 cm). Courtesy the artist and PATRON Gallery.
Cranbrook Academy of Art alumna Brittany Nelson (MFA Photography 2011) is the subject of List Projects 34: Brittany Nelson, on view January 15 through March 29, 2026, at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The exhibition premieres a new body of photographic and moving-image work filmed at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, a key site for radio astronomy and SETI research.
Nelson’s work explores the emotional dimensions of scientific inquiry, transforming instruments designed to detect signals from deep space into metaphors for intimacy, distance, and longing. She combines early analog processes, including mordançage, bromoil, and tintype, with archival research and science fiction narratives, blurring the boundaries between speculative imagination and material experimentation.
The exhibition also features Rebecca (2026), a new video work inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s novel and its cinematic adaptations. Shot on 35mm and handheld digital video, the piece uses sound recorded from the telescope’s mechanical systems to create an emotionally charged meditation on presence, absence, and the desire for connection.
Nelson is based in New York City and is an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Richmond.
Learn more:
Brittany Nelson’s Green Bank Observatory photographs – See Great Art
List Projects 34: Brittany Nelson – MIT List Visual Arts Center
