Look for Me in the Whirlwind (2000) about civil right activist Marcus Garvey was first place overall winner at the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 2001 and won best documentary at the 2002 Black International Cinema Awards. Nelson has made several productions for the Smithsonian Institution, including a tribute to African-American artists, entitled Free Within Ourselves, and Climbing Jacob’s Ladder. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002. Nelson also received fellowships at the American Film Institute, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Columbia University. He was on the selection panel for three years for the Fulbright Fellowship in film. For the 2003 The American Experience (PBS) episode The Murder Of Emmett Till, Nelson won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for Nonfiction Programming, Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize, and the George Foster Peabody Award. Nelson's 2004 film A Place of Our Own was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2004, he also won the Educational Video Center's Excellence in Community Service Award. In 2007, he received an Emmy nomination for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking as a producer of Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple that aired on PBS series The American Experience. On May 4, 2011, Nelson and his film Freedom Riders were featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show in a special program celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Riders. Nelson won two Emmy awards for the film in 2011: Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming, and Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking as one of the producers. Nelson’s 2014 documentary, Freedom Summer, profiled the 1964 Civil Rights movement activism in Mississippi. ‘’Freedom Summer’’ aired on PBS American Experience and won Best Documentary at the Pan-African film festival. Nelson directed the 2015 documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, the first of what is to be a three-part series of documentaries about African-American history titled America Revisited. He won an Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking as one of the producers of this film in 2016. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the NEH National Humanities Medal presented by President Obama in 2014. In 2015 the American Film Institute made him its Guggenheim Symposium Honoree. He was awarded a 2015 Individual Peabody Award, presented at the 2016 award ceremony. In 2016 he received