[1] He also is known for directing and playing the lead role in Heat and Sunlight, produced by Steve and Hildy Burns, also featuring Consuelo Faust, Don Bajema and Ernie Fosseliius.

This melting-pot of interlocking feature films was shot in diverse locations: Tenderloin hotels and alleys, East Bay homeless encampments and hobo jungles in the Nevada desert.

[5] What Mad Pursuit (2013), a feature documentary directed by Denny Dey, is an analysis of the 9 @ Night films, showing how they weave together to form one master work.

It was the first small-format video feature film to be transferred to 35 mm for theatrical release, and was produced by Don Taylor and Ben Myron and presented by Francis Ford Coppola.

Chalk explores the underworld of pool hustlers and follows a renegade from the Professional Tour (Don Bajema) who challenges a local player (Kelvin Han Yee).

Soon after, Nilsson moved to the Golden Gate YMCA, where the workshop was re-christened the Tenderloin yGroup, free and open to all, emphasizing expressivity, strong emotion and improvisational skills.

Along with colleagues Chikara Motomura, Kevin Winterfield and Mira Larkin, Nilsson ran weekly acting workshops and continued work on his 9 @ Night Film Cycle.

[5] The series played in Bay Area theaters in 2008 and won the San Francisco Film Critic's Circle Marlon Riggs Award that same year.

In collaboration with Studio Malaparte in Japan, Nilsson completed the first film in the collection, Winter Oranges, shot off the coast of Hiroshima on Sagi Island.

[12] In September 2000, Nilsson shot Samt in Jordan, working with a cast of young people assembled by ZENID, a Jordanian institute striving for social development.

On September 11, 2005, the Pacific Film Archive hosted the world premiere of Security, shot during Nilsson's residency at the University of California, Berkeley.

The film follows Nilsson, producer Olga Zurzhenko and Mickey Freeman as they search for the spot of Trotsky's vanished birthplace on the Ukrainian Steppes.

[17] Nilsson has appeared as minor roles in numerous television shows, starting in 1986 as the character Wango Mack in the Miami Vice series 3 episode Better Living Through Chemistry.

Featuring Stanley Tucci, Ron Ryan and Bruce MacVittie, Nilsson set the tone for the series, heavily influenced as it was by his film Signal 7.

The film features CGI color schemes created on location in Utah at the last surviving full-scale steel mill west of the Mississippi.

Presque Isle (2007) is a narrative feature written and directed by Nilsson, edited by Milena Grozeva Levy, and shot on location in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Northern Wisconsin by Mickey Freeman.

The executive producer of the film was Jeremiah Birnbaum, and it was co-produced by the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking, Fog City Pictures and Citizen Cinema.

A Leap to Take (2013) is an experimental feature film with twenty-one speaking roles, twenty-five extras and eight locations, including a moving London bus.

It was shot by Chris Damm and Galina Pasternak, with additional cinematographers Gustavo Ochoa, Mickey Freeman, Vincent Leddy and Luis de la Para.

Fourth Movement (2017), a Citizen Cinema Players dramatic fiction film shot by Aaron Hollander and edited by Deepika Metkar, which takes place on election night, Nov. 8, 2016, and concerns people involved in the jazz music scene; it features Brette McCabe, Marianne Heath, Lydia Becker, Melanie Shaw, Menbere Aklilu, Paul Nicholas, Paul Greenberg, Tiziana Perinotti, Howard Teich and Audrey Shiva Ghaemi, with music by the Fred Randolph Sextet.

In the 2000s, Nilsson, along with his team of producers (David and Carol Richards, Marshall Spight, John Stout, Michelle Anton Allen, Joel Simone, Kevin Michael Winterfield), collaborators (DP Mickey Freeman, DP/Actor/Editor Deniz Demirer), and editors (Motomura, Arthur Vibert, Michael MacBroom, Karen Kinghan, Gustavo Ochoa, Luis de la Parra and Faith Vasquez), have carried on his Direct Action Cinema approach, focusing on character, circumstance and back-story improvisation, with the goal of documenting the lives of grass-roots survivors who live in the shadow of corporate America.