Kelly Nipper’s interdisciplinary practice explores the interconnected concepts of scale, distortion, and proximity in time-based media—photography, video, and performance. She integrates dance practices informed by scientific principles, including biomechanics and motion capture, approaching the human body as a technology rather than an expressive identity. Nipper’s practice maps out the body through technology and geography to understand how to spatialize time. The broader strategy of imagining the possibilities of time in her work stems from the idea that a single condition or environment can endlessly fracture itself into different shapes and forms. At the intersection of photography’s historical connections to physiology, the occult, geology, and the social sciences, her work investigates the morphology of the medium. Through this exploration, she engages with the broader implications of movement analysis, communication theory, and climate change’s de-accelerated shifts in weather patterns and temperatures that are structuring the destruction of everything.

Since the late 1990s, Nipper’s work with dancers has primarily involved Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis (LBMA). She equates this system with other open, closed, or isolated systems—such as weaving, counting, or photography—which have been integral to the development of mechanical computers, AI, and the evolution of computer science and design in shaping the future of technology. This comparison offers context for her approach to the work. Over several years, collaborating with dance artist and choreographer Taisha Paggett, Marissa Ruazol, and Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis Instructors Ed Groff, Theresa Heiland, Sarah Leddy, and Liz Maxwell has led to the development of a grammar-based language that transcends disciplines merging dance with optical machinery and esoteric practices.

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 the 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship 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 2010: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum. Nipper’s work is in the public collections of the Migros Museum, Hammer Museum, Walker Art Center, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others.