UCI Arts Professor Coleman Collins Named 2025–26 Hellman Fellow

The program supports research by accomplished assistant professors

Coleman Collins, assistant professor in the Department of Art at the UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts, has been selected as a 2025–26 Hellman Fellow. His funded proposal, Passagenwerken, continues his interdisciplinary exploration of the relationships between real and virtual spaces and how they are socially produced.

The Hellman Fellows Program, established in 1995, supports the research of promising assistant professors across the University of California system and select private institutions. Since its founding, more than 2,000 faculty have received Hellman awards to advance their research, with UC Irvine joining the program in 2013.

Collins joins seven other UC Irvine faculty members named to the 2025–26 cohort of Hellman Fellows, representing fields ranging from art and education to biomedical engineering and Earth system science. 

“These eight outstanding assistant-rank faculty are engaged in research that pushes boundaries across a wide range of fields and are tackling big questions with real-world impact,” said Gillian Hayes, vice provost for academic personnel.

In addition to this honor, Collins was recently awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. His practice spans sculpture, video, photography and text, often working at the intersection of subject and object, original and duplicate, freedom and captivity. Before joining UCI Arts in 2023, Collins was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. 

To learn more about the 2025-26 Hellman Fellows, visit here. To learn more about Coleman Collins’ work, visit his Department of Art bio page here.