ANDREW PATRICK NELSON portrait
  • Chair, Film & Media Arts Department
  • Associate Professor, Film & Media Arts Department

Education

  • B.A. (Hons), Cinema Studies and English, University of Toronto
  • M.A., Film Studies, Carleton University
  • Ph.D., Film Studies, University of Exeter

Biography

Andrew Patrick Nelson is an historian of American cinema and culture, film programmer, museum curator, and media commentator. He is Chair of the Department of Film and Media Arts and Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Utah. He completed his PhD at the University of Exeter under the supervision of Steve Neale, and previously taught at the University of Calgary and Montana State University. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University and a guest film curator at the Autry Museum of the American West, The CM Russell Museum, and the Briscoe Western Art Museum. He is series editor of "The Popular West" at the University of Oklahoma Press and "Reel West" at the University of New Mexico Press. He serves on the Board of Directors of the John Wayne Birthplace and Museum and on the Advisory Board of Utah PBS.

Dr. Nelson's research focuses on topics in American cinema, history and culture. His first monograph, Still in the Saddle: The Hollywood Western, 1969-1980, was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2015. He is co-editor of ReFocus: The Films of Delmer Daves (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and editor of Contemporary Westerns: Film and Television since 1990 (Scarecrow Press, 2013). Some of his other writing can be found in A Companion to D.W. Griffith, The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh, Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film A History of Western American Literature, and elsewhere. 

He's appeared as a commentator in television series on History Channel, Fox News, Fox Nation, and INSP, and regularly lectures at museums and film societies around the nation. He was the film advisor on "Once Upon a Time...The Western," a major museum exhibition on Western art and film, which opened at the Denver Art Museum in May 2017 and moved the Montreal Museum of Fine Art in October. He curated exhibition based on â€‹Still in the Saddle at the Briscoe Western Art Museum in San Antonio in May of 2021.