Forward Looking
Na Mira
Department of Art Welcomes Three New Faculty
By Christine Byrd
The Claire Trevor School of the Arts recently welcomed three new faculty to the Department of Art. Na Mira, Coleman Collins and Jibade-Khalil Huffman are forward-looking artists and educators who bring distinctive worldviews — adding fresh perspectives to the department while continuing its long tradition of interdisciplinarity.
“Coleman, Khalil and Na bring exciting new energy to our faculty body, each working in dynamic and multivalent ways across mediums as well as critical and conceptual discourses,” said Amanda Ross-Ho, professor of art. “Their wide range of experiences will invigorate our departmental collaborations as well as their classrooms.”
All three of the new hires work across a variety of mediums, including video, and will be central to teaching courses focused on digital film.
Added Ross-Ho, “Students will benefit greatly from the addition of these new voices as they join our collective effort to encourage interdisciplinary models and expansive futures for artistic practice.”
Na Mira
Na Mira grew up feeling “in between.” Living in Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and the U.S., she was used to crossing borders and never quite feeling fluent in the languages used around her.
“I’m pretty comfortable with what is not familiar to me, and I assume that what I don’t know has meaning, and that I can find different ways to listen and communicate,” said Mira. “That’s been very influential to the way I approach art practice, community and materials.”
Mira joined the art department in July 2024, bringing a focus on video, film and installation. She is the winner of the 2024 Los Angeles Artadia Award, with work currently being featured at the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea and at the Doosan Art Center in Seoul. Mira earned an M.F.A. in New Genres from UCLA and previously taught at UC Riverside.
“I’m pretty comfortable with what is not familiar to me, and I assume that what I don’t know has meaning...”
The project Pilot TV: Experimental Media for Feminist Trespass — currently screening in the Venice Biennale and next year at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago exhibition, City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago, is particularly poignant for Mira. This performance event and community space was a project she and friends developed as undergraduates at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004: a TV studio that interrogated the relationship among media, representation and queer feminisms. Motivated by the desire to share resources and question the status quo, the Pilot TV collective ended up creating something that served as a roadmap to future generations.
“I often think about that with my students,” said Mira. “What worlds are you making, what worlds do you long for? What is it you and your friends care about doing together? As mysterious as that might be, your need to create what is at the edge of your articulation or dreams is really powerful.”
Mira heads up the art department’s experimental video and moving image area and teaches classes encouraging students to be both critical viewers and deeply sensing creators in our image-saturated world.
“I understand video as a genre within the history of art that was started by immigrants, people of color, women, queers and collectives,” said Mira. “So it’s really exciting for me to bring my experience and research to the students of Irvine who are — uniquely — the past, present and future of this medium’s legacy.”
Coleman Collins
As an interdisciplinary artist and writer, Coleman Collins uses video, photography, sculpture and text to explore how things are transmitted, copied and reiterated in both the real and virtual worlds. His work has been shown around the world including Los Angeles, New York, London, Vienna, Jerusalem and Ramallah. He earned his M.F.A. in New Genres from UCLA in 2018, has been a resident at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study program, and received grants from the NYFA Artists’ Corps and the Graham Foundation.
Image: Coleman Collins. Photo: Emily Zheng.
At UC Irvine, Collins is curating his first show, opening Jan. 25, 2025. The Intimacies Between Continents features three artists who use video, sculpture collage and installation to trace patterns of exchange across the Atlantic Ocean throughout history, engaging with post-colonial theory in ways Collins finds both interesting and at turns humorous.
“...I’m fascinated by the manner in which both physical and social spaces are constructed and determined by historical circumstances.”
Also in January, Collins’ work will go on exhibition at the Brief Histories art gallery in New York City. The show, entitled The Upper Room, uses a video installation and sculpture to examine the failures of African-American recolonization through the lens of vernacular architecture.
“I’m interested in the ways that these long-ago events have effects that continue to shape our lives today,” said Collins. “In particular, I’m fascinated by the manner in which both physical and social spaces are constructed and determined by historical circumstances.”
Collins joined Claire Trevor School of the Arts in 2023 as part of the UCI Black Thriving Initiative Poetic Justice cluster, through which the university aims to “build stronger connections between UCI and community-based institutions that focus on the production and preservation of Black history, culture and art.”
Image: Coleman Collins, Untitled (A recessed wall), 2024, Engineered wood, UV print on Dibond,30 x 23 in. Courtesy of the artist and Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles. Photo: Evan Walsh.
The cluster includes recently hired faculty in African American studies, business, and criminology, law & society.
Collins is teaching an introductory course that covers moving-image works and film theory. He is particularly interested in what he refers to as “counter-narratives” — the ways that artists and thinkers have used their work to push back against dominant historical narratives.
“It’s been really exciting working with the students and seeing the quality of their output,” said Collins. “This is a great institution, with so much momentum, I anticipate great opportunities to grow as an artist.”
Jibade-Khalil Huffman
Jibade-Khalil Huffman always knew he wanted to pursue art. After completing his bachelor’s from Bard College, Huffman earned two M.F.A. degrees — one in literary arts from Brown University and another in studio art from University of Southern California.
Image: Jibade-Khalil Huffman. Photo: Emily Zheng.
The last 18 months have been a whirlwind of activity, with Huffman opening an ambitious solo show, Control, at the Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles as well as The Double at Magenta Plains contemporary gallery in New York. His work is also part of LACMA’s Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film open through July 13, 2025.
Now, Huffman is looking forward to focusing on longer-term projects, including a collection of essays examining hip-hop, pop culture, cinema and video games. The pieces stem from literary performances he’s given over the years — solo or with a doppelgänger — that cut between prose and verse. He has previously published three books of poetry.
He is also collaborating on an installation combining film with an original multiplayer video game. With the narrative based on the witness protection program, characters can escape danger by swapping bodies, making the game “a model for second chances, change, or the inability to change,” explained Huffman.
“I’m very clear with students from the beginning that they’re not just making work in a bubble.”
Huffman brims with enthusiasm for his role as assistant professor at UC Irvine, which he started in July 2023.
“UC Irvine has an art department that privileges theory, writing and research-based work along with having a tradition of experimental film and video,” said Huffman. “Walking in the path that [professor emeritus] Ulysses Jenkins and [professor] Bruce Yonemoto have cleared, is an insane honor. I’m super psyched.”
At UCI, Huffman teaches courses that build on some of his own interests, such as collage-making and a documentary course that focuses on using found footage to explore topics like personal history and identity.
Image: Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Figure, 2019. Inkjet print, framed, 41 ¹⁄4" x 31 ¹⁄2" [HxW] (104.78 x 80.01 cm); Images courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles /New York.
“With my work, I want to give you something that throws you off center, that can be read in a variety of ways, and that really speaks to the complications of identity and Blackness and Black rage,” said Huffman. He also encourages students to consider the role of context and identity in their own art.
“I’m very clear with students from the beginning that they’re not just making work in a bubble,” said Huffman. “You are an artist in the world, making things seen by other people who bring their own contextualizing.”
Learn more about the art department and upcoming shows at art.arts.uci.edu.
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