Colleen Mullins is an active photographer and book artist, and is the Academic Director of Photography for the Art Institutes International Minnesota. Her current project, Elysium, examines the urban forest of New Orleans, and its new and delicate relationship with its human neighbors in the still choppy wake of Hurricane Katrina. She received a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant to continue the project. Last year she commenced a new project, Cultivar, examining the notion of home through both cultivated and preserved forest “stands” in her native California as told through a meandering journey through family history, new photographs, scanned ephemera, the story of a never-built dream house, and vintage images made by her father.