Brittany Nelson understands humanity’s quest to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, sending signals into space from remote areas.

“The big themes I deal with in my personal research are the parallels of space exploration — feelings of loneliness, isolation, and distance — felt within the LGBTQ community,” said Nelson, a photography and extended media professor at the University of Richmond.

Beyond the classroom, Nelson is a conceptual artist who specializes in using 19^th- and 20^th-century photography processes to create modern pieces. Space exploration is one of her focus areas. About a decade ago, she heard that the renowned Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute offered an artist residency.

“It was kind of secret,” she said. “You had to get nominated, but I couldn’t figure out who was on the board or who to talk to.”

The SETI Institute has special meaning for Nelson. She was born in 1984, the same year the nonprofit scientific organization formed from a NASA project searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.

“A lot of people when they hear SETI, they think of UFOs,” she said. “It’s not that. It’s a scientific community that partners with NASA and many others around the world.” The institute is based in Mountain View, California, and operates the Allen Telescope Array of 42 radio telescopes in the Cascade Mountains.

Growing up in Great Falls, Montana, Nelson developed a fascination with space travel and science fiction. A first-generation college student, she was drawn to photography, learning advanced digital techniques as well as antiquated ones from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

“These processes use metals that are sensitive to light,” Nelson explained. “It’s converting silver halide crystals to more stable forms of silver.” The result: metallic images that resemble pop culture sci-fi artifacts.

Over the years, Nelson chased down information about the SETI Institute artist residency. At the same time, she joined the University of Richmond and showed her work at exhibitions around the world. Her professional contacts improved, too.

“I was able to use this network to figure out who was nominating people in the art world, and then strategically asked for Zoom studio visits with all of these people,” she said.

In 2021, SETI invited Nelson to become their resident artist. The residency doesn’t require her to be at the institute in California, and it doesn’t offer compensation. But it does provide access to astronomers and the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California.

Since joining SETI, Nelson spent a week at the telescope with astronomer Wael Farah.

"I took an old-school film portrait camera usually used for fashion shoots,” she recalled. Farah programmed the telescopes to turn toward Nelson’s lens at the same time. “They look like clones, but also like big eyeballs.”

“Lately I’ve been asking these people I’m working with at SETI, ‘Does intelligence equal isolation?’” Nelson said. “That’s common with really intelligent people or people who think differently — they describe feeling like they’re an alien.”

Nelson hopes the residency shows UR students what’s possible — including choosing a career in the challenging world of professional art.

“If I see someone who’s a risk-taker with their work,” she said, “willing to take a crazy idea or throw out everything that they knew before and start over, this person is going to do really well.”