Bio

Tara Merenda Nelson is an artist working in performance, sculpture, sound, small gauge film and digital media. Her work playfully deconstructs images and objects to experiment with unorthodox combinations and create hybrid forms. Her filmmaking practice includes poetic Super 8 diary films, cable access video comedies, 16mm experimentation, handmade 35mm slides, found footage collage, live sound and expanded cinema performance. Under the name LOBSTER, Tara performs live, improvisational audio collage using multiple analog playback devices including : variable speed tape decks; Califone turntables; 8 track audio players and synthesizers. Since 2020 Tara has been creating a series of confessional tissue-box tableaus about her mid-life dilemmas composed exclusively with objects from Dollar Tree. Her single-edition artist book, MY DEEPEST WOUNDS, is a handmade diary charting the first years of sobriety and the impact of an astrological reckoning. The book consists of 126 hand-painted pages in a Composition notebook.

From 2015-2026 Tara was the Chief Curator at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, and was the lead programmer for the VSW Salon series and Managing Editor of the VSW Press. In 2018, she helped to launch the Film Art Book (FAB) imprint, focusing on artist books by film artists, including Rose Lowder, Ephraim Asili, Dani and Sheilah ReStack, Luther Price, Peggy Ahwesh, Bill Brand and Peer Bode.

Her films, videos and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art (NY and Miami), Mono No Aware (Brooklyn), The 8Fest (Canada), VideoEx (Switzerland) and the Sydney Underground Film Festival (AUS). She has taught digital media and film production courses at Montserrat, Ithaca College, Cornell University, University of Rochester and SUNY Brockport.

Tara holds an MFA in Film/Video from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and currently resides in Rochester NY with her husband Gordon and dog Lucy. She can be reached at taramerendanelson@gmail.com.