Dona Nelson
1947–

Dona Nelson (born 1947) is an American painter, best known for immersive, gestural, primarily abstract works employing unorthodox materials, processes and formats to disrupt conventional notions of painting and viewership. A 2014 New Yorker review observed, "Nelson gives notice that she will do anything, short of burning down her house to bully painting into freshly spluttering eloquence." Since 2002, long before it became a more common practice, Nelson has produced free-standing, double-sided paintings that create a more complex, conscious viewing experience. According to New York Times critic Roberta Smith, Nelson has dodged the burden of a "superficially consistent style," sustained by "an adventuresome emphasis on materials" and an athletic approach to process that builds on the work of Jackson Pollock. Writers in Art in America and Artforum credit her experimentation with influencing a younger generation of painters exploring unconventional techniques with renewed interest. Discussing one of Nelson's visceral, process-driven works, curator Klaus Kertess wrote, the paint-soaked "muslin is at once the tool, the medium, and the made."

Nelson has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Weatherspoon Art Museum and Tang Museum (survey, 2018), and group exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Rose Art Museum, Mary Boone Gallery and Marlborough Fine Art. Her two-sided paintings featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial were widely recognized and deemed some of the show's "most swooned-over works" by Art in America. Nelson has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994) and her work sits in numerous public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She lives in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, and is a professor of painting and drawing at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, where she has taught since 1991.