Nielsen's work is a contemporary application of one of the best-known avant-garde photographic processes - the photogram - which was first mastered by Man Ray and Maholy-Nagy at the beginning of the twentieth century. Each unique image is created without a camera by placing objects directly onto photographic paper and exposing them to light.

Nielsen started her career as a painter and is a colourist at heart. She calls her work 'painting with light' which refers to the performative nature of its creation. Nielsen replaces the traditional negative with a handmade matrix, built with multiple layers, found light sources and harnessing different wavelengths of the colour spectrum to create rich hues. Creating these pieces can take up to 12 hours per session and up to 100 exposures. The paper she uses is negative rather than positive, reversing the colours and often creating surprising new combinations. 'The final outcomes are pre-planned with strong intention and formally composed,' she explains, 'but because I'm working with light, they always have some surprises. The light bleeds and spills and doesn't want to be contained.'

Liz Nielsen was born in Wisconsin in 1975 and lives and works in New York City. She graduated with a BA in Philosophy and Spanish from Seattle University, a M.F.A. in Photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a B.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nielsen is part of this new generation that have returned to the essential elements of analogue photography and its processes as subject matter, reimagining the abstract and painterly potential of the medium. Her work has been exhibited extensively in New York, Chicago, Berlin, Dublin, Budapest, Paris and London.

Nielsen's work was part of the J.P. Morgan Curator's Highlights - "Pictures-In-Play" at Paris Photo Fair 2016. Her recent LA exhibition, I’d Like to Imagine You’re in a Place Like This, was one of Artforum’s cirtic’s picks of 2021. Her exhibitions have also been recently reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artslant, the Wall Street Journal and Libération, among others. Liz Nielsen has work in the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection as well as notable private collections internationally