Some of her most widely known works were created while she lived in the Bay Area in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, where she became well established among other artists in the avant-garde film circles of the 1960s and to the present (Gill, 28).
Additional positions she has held include a year at San Francisco State University from 1969 to 1970 and a semester in 1987 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Nelson's films were shown quietly in the underground circuit on the West and East coasts of the United States, until the mid-70s when she began to get press from sources that ranged from Playboy editors to Pauline Kael.
[6] In many of her major works she addresses subjects such as: childhood, memory, the idea of home/homeland and displacement, aging and death, and the symbolism of natural forces — particularly in relation to female beauty and power.
Her talents for editing what is often dreamlike imagery, combined with fine attention to the effects of language and sound on the moving image, serve to enhance the consistent aesthetic of her experimental films.
Instead, she creates "feminist" works in the broader sense of the term, they seek to find a more universal resonance as they address the personal and: "what is original, instinctive, and natural in womankind".
Commenting on her first film Schmeerguntz, a collaborative effort with Dorothy Wiley, Nelson said "I discovered how beautiful things look through the camera... A melon or dirty dishes, seen with a lens in close-up were translated into something else...