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.

Queer|Art is pleased to introduce The Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists. Developed and named in partnership with Mariette Pathy Allen, Aaryn Lang, and Serena Jara, this new annual $10,000 grant, awarded to draw attention to an existing body of work, sheds light on the under-recognized contributions of Black trans women visual artists and provides critical support to their continuing work. Winning artists will receive additional professional development resources and further guidance to bolster their creative development in the field. 

The Illuminations 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.

“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

NYALA MOON WINS FIFTH ANNUAL ILLUMINATIONS GRANT FOR BLACK TRANS
WOMEN VISUAL ARTISTS

Queer|Art is pleased to announce the winner of the fifth annual Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists, Nyala Moon. The Brooklyn-based filmmaker & artist will receive a $10,000 cash grant, professional development support, and individual studio visits with members of the judges panel to support their practice.

2024 Illuminations Grant Judge, jaamil olawale kosoko writes: “Nyala Moon is an extraordinary artist whose work leaves a lasting impression, inviting sustained engagement and deep reflection. Her unique brand of humor, fresh and macabre, rises from personal trauma, creating a dynamic tension that captivates and challenges the viewer. With impeccable timing and technically sound filmmaking, Nyala masterfully explores YouTube culture as a cinematic language, weaving it into a storytelling style that feels both novel and immediate. Her voice is one that demands to be seen and heard, and her stories deserve to reach a wider audience.”

2024 Illuminations Grant Judge, M Lamar continues, “her fresh singular voice is a breath of fresh air in this cultural moment where trans panic is at an all time high. Moon is the future of radical rehumanization representation. Her vision centers her experience in a warm and charming embrace for the viewer that, I believe will not only have a huge impact within the art world but has the power to reach into the greater cultural universe creating deeper empathy, love, and understanding. Nyala Moon is a superstar!!!”

Nyala Moon is a graduate of City College with an MFA in film production. Nyala was also a 2020-2021 Queer|Art Film Fellow, a TV writing fellow for Hillman Grad, and a Film Fatales director fellow. Nyala’s latest film, How Not To Date While Trans, has won audience and best short film awards at Inside Out Toronto’s LBGT Film Festival, Wicked Queer Boston’s LGBT Film Festival, Translation Seattle’s 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival, and NewFest 22. In June 2022, Nyala was selected as a 2022 NewFest/Netflix New Voices Filmmaker Grant winner. Her film, How Not To Date While Trans, was selected for distribution through Frameline's New Voices program. Her latest short film, Dilating For Maximum Results, won the Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding US short at OutFest and Newfest. Filmmaker Magazine named Nyala one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film 2023. In March 2024, Nyala Moon was selected as one of the 71 artists of the 2024 Whitney Biennial.

Moon was first inspired to pursue acting, but eventually found her true calling as a filmmaker creating stories that showed trans women as full people who experience a full life. Her first short film after grad school, How Not To Date While Trans, was made in defiance of what cishet people thought the trans dating experience was. Moon takes issue with the dogmatic approach and opinion on how a trans woman should date, and strives to shift that ideology. She says, “my work has been and will be for two different audiences. I want my trans siblings to watch my work and feel seen, but I also want to teach cishet people how to love us… I use the niche topic specific to the trans community and tie it with universal themes like love and loneliness. My greatest mission as an artist is to universalize the trans experience for everyone.”

2024 ILLUMINATIONS GRANT FINALISTS

In addition to Moon, four other visual artists were acknowledged as finalists for this year—Fatima Jamal, Steven Anthony Johnson II, Marcelline Mandeng Nken, and Ari Moore.

2024 ILLUMINATIONS GRANT JUDGES

M Lamar is a composer who works across opera, metal, performance, video, sculpture and installation to craft sprawling narratives of radical becoming. Lamar holds a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Yale School of Art, sculpture program, before dropping out to pursue music. Lamar’s work has been presented internationally, most recently at The Rewire Festival in The Hague, Trauma Bar Berlin, Atrium na Žižkově Prague, The Manhattan School of Music, Wellcome Collection London, The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Funkhaus Berlin Germany, Kunstgebäude Stuttgart, The Meet Factory in Prague, among others. 

Tourmaline is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist whose practice highlights the experiences of Black, queer, and trans communities and their capacity to impact the world. Her films and photographs rewrite mainstream narratives and cultural histories to initiate a paradigm shift and imagine a more pleasure-filled future. Tourmaline’s practice invites us to fundamentally reshape our beliefs about what is possible. She received her BA from Columbia University in 2006, and has had solo exhibitions at MUDAM, Luxembourg and Chapter NY, New York. Her work was included in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice and notable group exhibitions at South London Gallery, MASS MoCA, the Tate Modern, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, The New Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, among many others. Tourmaline lives and works in Miami, FL.

jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. kosoko works across the creative realms of live art performance, video, sculpture, and poetry. As an educator and community organizer, they approach politics and education as extensions of their creative process. Through ritual, embodied poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body, kosoko conjures and crafts perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible. They lecture regularly at Princeton University and The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Visit jaamil.com for more information.

APPLY

*STAY TUNED IN 2025 TO APPLY FOR THE NEXT GRANT CYCLE!*

What information does the application require?

• Contact info, narrative bio, and headshot

• One sentence description of your artistic practice

• One short essay question on 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. You can also watch this year’s application info session here. Thank you!

MEET THE TEAM

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 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.

GALLERY

ARCHIVE

Left to right: Golden, I'm a buzz light years away from language & a land name; Utē Petit, Marshland Restoration Program; Lee Laa Ray Guillory, Adella’s Reflection, (2020); Keijaun Thomas, I Looked Up at the Sky and I, Imagined All of the Stars Were My Sisters, photo by Charles Rice, (2020).