Kelly Nipper’s art practice in time-based and lens-based media examines how bodies and materials register and transform space through movement under pressure, duration, and environmental forces. Working with photography, video, dance, and movement analysis, she focuses on the spatial and temporal processes through which motion becomes form. Nipper approaches the body as a technology—capable of registering shifts in stability, orientation, and scale—and investigates how time can be spatialized, fractured, and reconfigured into new forms.
Grounded in photography’s historical ties to physiology, esoteric practices, geology, and the social sciences, her work examines the medium’s material logics. Through this lens she brings movement analysis into dialogue with environmental forces that are actively restructuring climate systems, perception, and social organization.
Since the mid-1990s, Nipper’s movement research has centered on Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis (LBMA), which she understands as a proto-computational system in which effort, direction, and timing function as variables. She places this system in dialogue with other rule-based structures—such as weaving, counting, architectural notation, and photographic processes—positioning movement as both code and form, and the body as a site where spatial and temporal architectures converge. Over several years, sustained collaboration with dancer Marissa Ruazol has shaped a movement grammar, informed by formative work with dance artist Taisha Paggett and ongoing engagement with LBMA instructors including Ed Groff, Theresa Heiland, Sarah Leddy, and Liz Maxwell.
Nipper’s work has been the subject of solo presentations at The Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthaus Zürich, Hammer Museum, South London Gallery, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, and Tramway. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023 and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2007. Selected group exhibitions include Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance, Walker Art Center; Global Groove: Art, Dance, Performance and Protest, Museum Folkwang; Danser Sa Vie, Centre Pompidou; and the 2010 Whitney Biennial.
Her work is held in public collections including the Migros Museum, Walker Art Center, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, MCA Chicago, Orange County Museum of Art, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Hammer Museum, and MoCA. Nipper is based in Los Angeles and holds an MFA from CalArts.