Jasmine Abena Colgan is an avant-garde artist, educator and scholar who is based in Colorado. She primarily works with photographic printing processes such as Platinum & Palladium as well as the Chrysotype, and mixes together multiple mediums to address social issues in her work. In 2019, Colgan and chemist, Marissa S. Martinez, recreated the alternative photographic printing solution, Chrysotype, using raw gold from the Obuasi gold mine in Kumasi, Ghana and they titled this solution the GhanaType. Obuasi gold mine is known to be one of the first gold mines to initiate the Atlantic Slave Trade in Ghana. The work Jasmine creates integrates her cultural upbringing as a Woman of Colors, living in America as a bi-racial woman of Irish American-Ghanaian roots who never really fit in in the world until she developed the skin condition vitiligo.
Colgan earned her BFA degree from the University of Colorado Denver studying photography and later earned her MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder and received a College Teaching Certificate through an accelerated program at Boulder. Professor Colgan is currently an Adjunct at Colorado State University and coordinates the Photo Image Making area of the Art & Art History Department.