Nellie Ellen Shepherd

Nellie Ellen Shepherd (April 30, 1877 – July 18, 1920) was an American painter. She was one of the earliest professional women artists in Oklahoma.

A native of Thayer, Kansas, Shepherd was one of eight children, six daughters and two sons, of George T. and Martha Ellen Shepherd. The family moved to a homestead near Oklahoma City during the Land Rush of 1889. Nellie graduated from high school and enrolled in the Art Academy of Cincinnati, before studying in Paris for three years and working with Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin; her portrait of her sister Lottie was selected for the 1910 Paris Salon, where it won an honorable mention. In 1916 she took lessons at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Kansas City Art Institute. In 1917 she was named to head the art department of the Oklahoma College for Women, and in 1918 she was elected president of the Oklahoma Art Association; she also gave private instruction, Shepherd suffered from poor health for some years, and after sojourns in Colorado and Arizona she died in Tucson of tuberculosis. The original family homestead in Oklahoma City is today part of the Shepherd Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.