Professor, Chair
Crown Family Endowed Professor for Innovation in the Arts

Film & Media Studies

Dylan Nelson is a producer, director, writer, and occasional shooter of documentary films. Most recently, she produced The Stamp Thief (Palm Springs 2025), a feature that seeks to solve a Holocaust-era mystery, and she wrote and produced The Stolen (Big Sky 2025), a feature that explores the story of children kidnapped during the 1970s-80s Argentine military dictatorship. She directed, wrote, and produced the documentary feature Mississippi Messiah, about civil rights iconoclast James Meredith, which premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in 2022 and will release on public television in 2026. She produced the documentary feature Groomed, about child sexual assault, which was released worldwide on Discovery + in 2021. She also contributed a chapter on archival filmmaking to Reclaiming Popular Documentary (2021), a scholarly collection from Indiana University Press. 

Dylan produced and wrote "Last Dance at Johnson's Barn" (2018), a short documentary that premiered in competition at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and won a number of festival awards. Her other credits as producer or director include the feature documentaries Merchants of Doubt (Telluride/Sony Pictures Classics 2014), The Hollywood Complex (Hot Docs 2011/Showtime 2012), Soundtrack for a Revolution (Tribeca/Cannes 2009, PBS's American Experience 2011), and Nanking (Sundance 2007/HBO 2008). Both Soundtrack for a Revolution and Nanking were short-listed for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Dylan’s honors include an Emmy nomination, three International Documentary Association Award nominations, and a Producers Guild of America nomination for Producer of the Year in Documentary Theatrical Motion Pictures. In 2019, Nelson was selected as one of 20 documentary producers worldwide to attend the Sundance Creative Producing Summit. She is a member of the Producers Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America.

Dylan began her film career as a screenwriter and has taught at Colorado College since 2003.

Regular Classes

CC100 Film Manifestos, Filmmaking

FM102 Basic Filmmaking

FM202 Screenwriting

FM210 The Story of Us: Local History and Documentary Filmmaking

FM310 Shooting Shakespeare

FM312 Documentary Form and Filmmaking

FM332 Creative Documentary Form

FM400 Independent Film, Filmmaking, and the Sundance Film Festival

FM402 Senior Thesis (Creative)