Collin Douma

Like most kids, Collin Douma started drawing the minute he could grip a crayon without eating it. The difference is, he never quit. By 18, he was already winning film festivals in Canada—yes, they have those—and somehow landed work in the National Gallery’s permanent collection. Not bad for a teenager with a pencil.

 

He studied animation the old-fashioned way at Algonquin College, back when people still flipped paper instead of swiping screens. Then came children’s books, digital stuff, advertising, and all that.

 

But he never stopped making his own art—he kept showing up in galleries, collaborating with local misfits in Toronto, and building a creative family that didn’t ask too many questions. Nobody got rich, but the work got done.

 

In 2011, he moved to New York. By then, he had stopped selling his creativity to the economy and started trying to figure out what it was for. Conceptual work? Bigger projects?  Messier questions? Less “content,” more truth—or at least, the search for it.

 

His art pokes at social anxieties, cosmic jokes, and the strange feeling you get when two things that shouldn’t go together suddenly make sense. Collin is chasing moments of meaning in a world that mostly doesn’t make any. And when it works, even for a second, you feel it: like the universe finally said something worth hearing.