Colleen Mullins

Colleen Mullins is a photographer and book artist whose work spans both traditional and conceptual approaches to the medium. She has received numerous grants and fellowships, including two McKnight Fellowships, four Minnesota State Arts Board Grants, and, in 2020, a nomination for the Leica Oskar Barnack Award for her project Expositions Are the Timekeepers of Progress.

Mullins has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, the Penland School of Crafts Winter Residency, and the In Cahoots Residency. Her work is held in the collections of institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston–Hirsch Library, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Southeast Museum of Photography, and the University of Arizona Special Collections, among others.

Her photographs and essays have appeared in Photo District News (PDN), The Oxford American Eyes on the South, The New York Times Lens Blog, and various textbooks. She has also written for Afterimage and PDNedu and occasionally publishes independent book reviews. Recent exhibitions include shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and The Georgia Center for the Book.

Mullins is a member of the Rolls and Tubes Collective, a group formed during the COVID-19 pandemic that explores themes of commodification and domesticity through reinterpretations of historical photographs using toilet paper as a creative element. In August 2021, the collective released a limited-edition book featuring forty of their over one hundred works, which sold out within eighteen hours. Their exhibition Rolls and Tubes: A History of Photography debuted at the Tilt Institute for the Contemporary Image in 2021, later traveled to San Francisco, and was on view at the Griffin Museum of Photography from June 1 to July 30, 2023.

Mullins currently lives and works in San Francisco.