Colette Fu received her MFA in Fine Art Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003, and soon after began devising complex compositions that incorporate photography and pop-up paper engineering. She has designed for award-winning stop motion animation commercials and free-lanced for clients including Greenpeace, Vogue China, Canon Asia and Moët Hennessy • Louis Vuitton and the Delaware Disaster Research Center. Her pop-up books are included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the West Collection, and many private and rare archive collections. In 2014, Fu attended a 6-month artist residency at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, where she continued her “We Are Tiger Dragon” project, an extensive visual exploration of China’s ethnic minorities. There she also designed China’s largest (1 spread) pop-up book measuring 2.5 x 5 x 1.7 meters high. In October 2017, Colette created the world's largest – Tao Hua Yuan Ji, a 13.8 x 21 feet pop-up book that people could enter, at the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center.
Fu's numerous awards include a 2020 Joan Mitchell Painter’s & Sculptors Grant, the 2018 Meggendorfer Prize for best paper engineered artist book awarded biennially by the Movable Book Society, a Fulbright Research Fellowship to China, and grants from the Independence Foundation, Leeway Foundation, En Foco, Red Bull, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, CFEVA (Center for Emerging Visual Artists), New York Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Puffin Foundation and Society for Photographic Education. She has attended many fully-funded artist residencies including those at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Yaddo, the Macdowell Colony, Sacatar, the Vermont Studio Center, the Delaware Contemporary, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Visual Studies Workshop, the Institute of Electronic Arts at Alfred University, the Millay Colony and the Alden B. Dow Center for Creativity. Her solo show "Wanderer/Wonderer: the Pop-ups of Colette Fu" was presented at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2016/17.
A passionate educator, Fu also teaches artmaking as a way to give voice to communities through pop-up paper-engineered projects. She teaches pop-up courses and community workshops to marginalized populations at art centers, universities and institutions internationally.
”She simply has a way with people, says her friend Sally Blakemore. ‘Colette’s manner of speaking is very subtle and almost shy, but her personality is huge. She doesn’t want to take center stage. Instead, she lets her work speak for itself.” Sally Blakemore, American Craft, July 2015
“Much as her books come to life when they open up, revealing magic and wonder inside, Fu has emerged as a unique and passionate artist by consistently venturing out of her comfort zone. Happy to blend in, she shines reaching out.” Joyce Lovelace, American Craft, July 2015.