Nina Nelina, born Ninell Amsheyevna Nurenberg, was a Soviet opera singer and coloratura soprano. She was born in Moscow on 4 August 1923, the daughter of the painter Amshey Nurenberg and the ballerina and painter Polina Mamicheva.
She lived with her parents in Paris from 1926 to 1928. In 1930 she began piano studies with Elena Gnesina at the Gnesin music school. She graduated in 1940, having studied piano with Gnesina and singing with Nadezhda Verbova, then continued vocal training with Ksenia Dorliak at the Moscow Regional Music College. From 1941 to 1943, while in Tashkent with her parents, she studied voice with Maria Brian and piano with Vera Razumovskaya at the evacuated Leningrad Conservatory.
After returning to Moscow in 1943, Nelina sang in the chorus of the Moscow Operetta Theatre. In 1945 she joined the Shevchenko Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theatre, where she sang Violetta in Verdi's La traviata in Ukrainian. She returned to Moscow in 1946 and entered the Bolshoi Theatre opera company, despite not having completed higher musical education. There she worked under the guidance of Valeria Barsova and, on the theatre administration's recommendation, adopted the name Nina Nelina.
Nelina made her Bolshoi debut as Rosina in Rossini's The Barber of Seville in 1948. Her further roles included Esmeralda in Smetana's The Bartered Bride, Prilepa in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, Kate in Puccini's Madama Butterfly, Gilda in Verdi's Rigoletto, Olga in Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka, Lakmé in Delibes's Lakmé, Zaychik in Morozko, Zofia in Moniuszko's Halka, Barbarina in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Frasquita in Bizet's Carmen, and Countess Ceprano in Rigoletto. Her stage partners included Ivan Kozlovsky and Pavel Lisitsian, and she toured widely in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Hungary, and Austria during the 1950s.
Alongside her opera work, she gave concert performances, including a creative evening at the House of Actors in 1949 and a solo recital at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in 1950. In 1955 she took part in 48 concerts across the Arctic, including at the drifting station North Pole-1, and received the title Honorary Polar Explorer. She was awarded the Medal for Labour Distinction in 1951. Nelina transferred from the Bolshoi Theatre to the State Concert Organization of the USSR in 1957 and worked there until 1963, when she resigned because of illness.
Nelina was married to the baritone Vladimir Chekalin and later, from 1951 until her death, to the writer Yuri Trifonov. She died in Druskininkai on 26 September 1966 and was buried at Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow.