Nathan Oliveira (born December 19, 1928) is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California. Since the late 1950s he is the veteran of nearly one hundred solo exhibitions and hundreds of group exhibitions, in important museums and galleries worldwide, including several Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibitions. Beginning in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, to the present he has consistently exhibited his evolving work. He has taught painting for several decades in California since the early 1950s when he taught in Oakland and then at Stanford University. He's considered to be one of the pioneers of the return to the figure in American painting that originated in the California Bay area in the 1950s. Along with various colleagues, Oliviera responded to Abstract expressionism in the mid-1950s by returning to imagery.