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Rachel Nelson

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Dr. Rachel Nelson is director and chief curator of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences. She is also co-director of Visualizing Abolition, a large-scale initiative designed to shift the social attachment to prisons through art and education. Nelson has curated and organized many group and solo exhibitions. She also writes and publishes extensively on contemporary art and geopolitics, including exhibition catalogue essays, journal articles, and reviews in Journal of Curatorial Studies, Public History Weekly, Brooklyn Rail, NKA, Third Text, Savvy, and African Arts. She teaches in the Visualizing Abolition Studies program at UC Santa Cruz.

Email: renelson@ucsc.edu

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