Colette Fu received her MFA in Fine Art Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003. In 2008 she received a Fulbright Fellowship to photograph the 25 ethnic minorities of her mother’s hometown of Yunnan Province, China. She creates most of her work at artist residencies such as the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Instituto Sacatar, Bemis Center, Visual Studies Workshop, the Millay Colony, and the Alden B. Dow Center for Creativity. Fu has received awards from the Sovereign Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Virginia Commission for the Arts, Constance Saltonstall Foundation, En Foco, Photographer's Forum, Nikon, the Puffin Foundation and the Society for Photographic Education. She freelances and teaches pop-up courses at various art centers and institutions mainly on the East coast.

For the past seven years I have been making one-of-a-kind artist’s books that combine my photography with paper engineering.  Pop-up and flap books originally illustrated ideas about astronomy, fortune telling, navigation, anatomy of the body and other scientific principles.  This history prompted me to construct my own books reflecting ideas on how our selves relate to society today. Initially, the challenge of creating pop-up books, having to construct something that physically would fold down into a confined space helped limit what I could create. Experience and experimentation have forced me to think otherwise; as I problem solve, the paper takes over and leads beyond what I thought was physically possible. My pop-ups are a way for me to speak and inform; the real and implied motion in the pop-ups link to a temporal element, and an inevitable corollary is to awe and unsettle.  With pop-up books I want to eliminate the boundaries between book, installation, photography, craft and sculpture.