The Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists sheds light on the under-recognized contributions of Black trans women visual artists and provides critical support to their continuing work.

Monique in her Room, Queens NY, image by Mariette Pathy Allen — *Monique in her Room, Queens NY,* image by Mariette Pathy Allen

The Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists is an annual $10,000 grant awarded to provide critical support to Black trans women whose work has often been under-recognized in the visual art field. Now in its 5th year, the Illuminations Grant was developed and named in partnership with Mariette Pathy Allen, Aaryn Lang, and Serena Jara. Winning artists and finalists will receive additional professional development resources and further guidance to bolster their creative development in the field.

“The Illuminations Grant not only highlights the lacking representation of Black trans women in the visual arts,” says Lang, “but also seeks to confront the systemic barriers that deny them artistic opportunities and a sustainable craft. By supporting this grant, Mariette Pathy Allen challenges herself and the art industry to see Black trans women as more than mere subjects, while forging a new pathway for visual artists within this community to thrive.”

ABOUT

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The Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists, a $10,000 grant, supports visual artists who are Black trans women. This grant is made possible entirely through support provided by visual artist Mariette Pathy Allen, whose body of photographic work over the last forty years has been squarely focused on expanding cultural consciousness around gender and transformation. The development of this grant was stewarded by consultant and writer Aaryn Lang, working in collaboration with Mariette Pathy Allen, Serena Jara, and Queer|Art. In order to further recognize finalists for their artistic achievements, Queer|Art is pleased to announce that the grant will also provide a $1,250 award to four distinguished finalists.

The llluminations Grant is administered through Queer|Art with a rotating panel of judges, each of whom will conduct a studio visit with the winning artist as part of the award’s focus on supporting creative and professional development. Judges for the 2025 grant cycle include Legacy Russell, Jordyn Jay, and Lee Laa Ray Guillory. Queer|Art staff will also provide the winning artist and finalists with consultations and further access to many of the tools they have developed in conjunction with the organization’s cornerstone creative and professional development program, Queer|Art|Mentorship.

Qualified artists must be Black trans women working in visual art and based in the United States. Applications are open March 31, 2025–July 2, 2025.

For questions, email Queer|Art Design & Marketing Manager, Andrius Alvarez-Backus at andrius@queer-art.org.

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APPLY

APPLICATIONS OPEN - MARCH 31st, 2025
COMPLETE APPLICATION - JULY 2nd, 2025

What information does the application require?

Contact info, narrative bio, and headshot
Demographic information
One sentence description of your artistic practice
Two short essay questions on your artistic practice
2 references that can speak to your practice
CV
Work samples (12 samples maximum, details below)

Work Sample Specifications:

Choose from any of the following formats to upload work samples that best represent your practice.

Allowed Media Types:

Images (up to 10MB each)
Video (up to 500MB each)
PDFs (up to 20MB each)
External media from YouTube, Vimeo and SoundCloud

Images do not have to be a particular size, as SlideRoom's servers will process them to fit their system. Their processors will resize anything larger than 1280 x 1280 x 72 ppi to fit within those limitations.

Image file formats accepted: .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .tif, .tiff, .bmp, .tga
Video file formats accepted: .m4v, .mov, .mp4, .wmv, .flv, .asf, .mpeg, .mpg, .mkv

Please include title, medium, year, and brief description of each work sample.

Note: Application fees for all applicants have been waived.

Questions? Please carefully review our Frequently Asked Questions before contacting us with questions about the grant or application process. Thank you!

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2025 ILLUMINATIONS GRANT JUDGES

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award, a 2022 Pompeii Commitment Digital Fellow, a 2023 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow, and a 2024-25 Lunder Institute for American Art Fellow. Her first book is Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020). Her second book is BLACK MEME (2024).

Originally from Jacksonville, FL, Jordyn Jay (she/her) is a community organizer, arts advocate, and producer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Black Trans Femmes in the Arts Collective (BTFA). Before founding BTFA, Jordyn received her Master's degree in Art Politics from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Jordyn is a firm believer in the power of art to inspire radical sociopolitical change and is dedicated to using that power for Black trans liberation.

Lee Laa Ray Guillory is a New Orleans based interdisciplinary artist and independent curator whose work is grounded in her devotion to Black mysticism and photographic investigation of intersectional identity. Guillory inherited rituals of hair maintenance, oral mythologies, and alternative photographic practices, serving as the foundational elements of her work. Her multifaceted art making practice is incited by Louisiana's religious history of European, Indigenous, and Afro-diasporic spiritual syncretization. Her interdisciplinary practice follows the tradition of art as ritual, with past works offering divination to the Mississippi River watershed, ancestral veneration via self portraiture, immersive photo-based installations, and spirit led photography.

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VIRTUAL INFO SESSION

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MEET THE TEAM

Mariette Pathy Allen, image courtesy of the artist

Mariette Pathy Allen is a photographer of transgender, genderfluid, and intersex communities. Moving from painting, a solitary activity, to photography, Allen has been documenting the transgender community for over four decades. In 1978, on the last day of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Allen met Vicky West, a trans woman she befriended and through whom she was first invited to Fantasia Fair, a transgender conference where she would serve as official photographer. She went on to author several books that have brought visibility to transgender communities across the world including Transformations: Cross-dressers and Those Who Love Them (1989), Masked Culture: The Greenwich Village Halloween Parade (1994), The Gender Frontier (2004), TransCuba (2014), and Transcendents: Spirit Mediums in Burma and Thailand (2017).

“Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, most of the people I came to know had never met anyone like themselves. The feelings of fear and guilt that they experienced most of their lives were significantly reduced through the relief and joy of finding community. Over time, I developed relationships with the great range of gender nonconformists, and my photography, writing, and speaking skills allowed me to become an activist for transgender rights. With that activism came a deeper understanding of the dangers and public misunderstanding of gender variant people. The attitudes of medical and legal establishments, the callous media presentations, and the violence ordinary people felt justified in expressing, alarmed me. The people who were hurt the most by attackers were, and continue to be, black transfeminine sex workers. At the same time, more and more black trans women have become successful as performers, dancers, singers, actresses, and larger than life personalities. I missed seeing black trans women who are visual artists.

Although I was already aware of the violence that trans women face on a daily basis, it was only when Serena introduced me to Aaryn that I realized I could do something about the limited options for visual artists whose talents may never have been nurtured or valued. This grant is the first to be offered specifically for Black transgender women and femmes in support of their path within visual arts. Although focused very precisely, I believe that it will have an important impact on the artists themselves, and their influence on the art world.”

Mariette Pathy Allen is represented by ClampArt in New York City which recently hosted "Transformations," a solo exhibition of her early transgender work, from February 25th to April 10th, 2021.

Aaryn Lang is a Black, Ohio-born consultant, writer, public speaker, and creative visionary, dedicated to advancing the social, economic, and political well-being of the transgender community, with a specific focus on Black transgender women. Through her involvement in the Trans Women of Color Collective of Ohio, Aaryn played a pivotal role in the Black Lives Matter movement and network. She connected the struggle for Black trans rights to the resurgence of the Black civil rights movement following the murder of Mike Brown. Aaryn organized the first National Day of Action for Black Trans Women in history and introduced a new framework for Black and LGBTQ movement spaces to support and uplift Black trans resistance. Her insights and expertise led to her becoming a founding board member of The Marsha P. Johnson Institute. A sought-after speaker, Aaryn has engaged audiences at The White House, Vice, The Claremont Colleges, Columbia University, OSU, NYU, and more. She has contributed writings to The Root, them., Cosmopolitan, and has been featured in HuffPost, Mic, Allure, and many other publications. Aaryn has co-written and starred in multiple media projects, such as Barnard College’s "Don’t Be a Bystander," Patrisse Cullors’s "Malcolm Revisited," and notably hosted the Emmy-Nominated PBS Digital series "First Person."

Miss Lang continues to advance her work creatively and philanthropically. In collaboration with Digital Media Management and Anne Hathaway, Aaryn conceptualized, developed, and hosted the digital series "Miss Lang Presents," a week-long content event exploring topics around Black Trans liberation, arts activism, family, and education amid a global pandemic and political uprisings, which garnered over 4.5 million video views on Instagram. She is also the creator of the first artistic grant solely for Black transgender women, The Illuminations Grant, hosted by Queerart NYC and in partnership with Mariette Pathy Allen and Serena Jara. Aaryn serves on the advisory board for The Black Trans Fund, a fund explicitly supporting Black trans joy and liberation across the United States. Aaryn optimizes her experience as an organizer and her skills as a creative to develop content that interrogates the current conditions and challenges her viewers to see popular topics and current events through a different lens.

Serena Jara is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, video, drawing, and sound. In her photos, she reflects on visibility as a tool used to both empower and manipulate trans people, creating staged portraits to complicate tropes of assimilationist representation. Referencing cinematic imagery and celluloid glamour, she explores the limits of a visual culture dominated by cisgender interpretations of trans experiences. Her work has been featured in institutions such as MOMA PS1, Fundación del Centro Cultural del México Contemporáneo, Dixon Place Theatre, and Cuchifritos Gallery, as well as online publications such as DIS, V Magazine, Refinery 29, and Mic.

For the past two and half years, Jara has been working with Mariette Pathy Allen, archiving and developing new pathways for access to her work, advising closely on the management of her legacy, and supporting the development of the Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists.