Coreen Mary Spellman, printmaker, painter, and teacher, was born on March 17, 1905, in Forney, Texas, one of six children of Michael and Carrie (Huffines) Spellman. Her siblings were Thomas, Mick, Troy, Lillian and Helen. Her father was a well-to-do Irish farmer and banker. Coreen was interested in art from an early age, and her parents encouraged her interest. Spellman majored in costume design at the Texas State College for Women in Denton (later Texas Woman's University), where she earned her bachelor of science degree in 1925. She received a master's degree in art from the Teachers' College at Columbia University in 1926. She took art history and museum classes at Harvard University on a Carnegie Summer Scholarship in 1927 and from 1928 to 1929 attended the Art Students League in New York City. After her year at the Art Students League Spellman accepted a post in the art department at her Alma Mater, where she taught until her retirement in 1974. Spellman studied with Vivian L. Aunspaugh, Charles Locke, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Vyclav Vytlacil, Carlos Merida, Charles J. Martin, and Eliot O'Hara. From 1941 to 1942 she attended the University of Iowa, where she earned a master of fine arts degree.

She was skilled in watercolor, etching, aquatint, and mezzotint and was particularly fluent in lithography. Spellman exhibited her work extensively throughout the Southwest and in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and New York. She won many prizes in competitive exhibitions. In 1932 the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the Dallas Museum of Art) mounted her first solo exhibition, which was the first of more than thirteen solo exhibitions at institutions like the Witte Museum in San Antonio (1933), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1933), the Santa Fe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico (1949), New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico (1949), and the Elisabet Ney Museum in Austin (1950). In the mid-1950s Spellman, Associate Professor in the Art Department, was chosen to design the exterior mural for the new Arts and Sciences building at Texas Woman's University. The mural forms part of the brick wall facing Oakland Avenue.

Spellman was one of eight founding members of the Printmakers Guild (later the Texas Printmakers), and was active in the group until it disbanded. She was also a member of the Southern States Art League, Denton Art League, Delta Phi Delta, Delta Kappa Gamma Society, Associated Art Instructors of Texas, and National Women's Teacher Association. In addition to her teaching, exhibition, and club activities, she lectured, illustrated books and pamphlets, and traveled extensively. For many summers she taught in New Mexico. Spellman was honored posthumously by a portfolio of twelve lithographs assembled by the National Alumnae Association of Texas Woman's University. Several of her prints were exhibited in the 1990 exhibition, "The Texas Printmakers, 1940–1965." Her work is represented in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Joslyn Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; the Dallas Museum of Art; the San Antonio Museum Association; Southern Methodist University, Dallas; Texas Woman's University, Denton; and private collections.
—Sources: Ancestry.com, TWU website, Handbook of Texas Online, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/SS/fsp29.html