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.

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. 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. Winning artists and finalists will receive additional professional development resources and further guidance to bolster their creative development in the field.

Now in its 7th year, the Illuminations Grant was developed and named in partnership with Mariette Pathy Allen, Aaryn Lang, and Serena Jara. The 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 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 2026 grant cycle include Jordyn Jay, Isis Awad, and Utē Petit.

“The Illuminations Grant not only highlights the lacking representation of Black trans women in the visual arts, 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.” —Aaryn Lang

MARCELLINE MANDENG NKEN WINS SEVENTH ANNUAL ILLUMINATIONS GRANT FOR BLACK TRANS
WOMEN VISUAL ARTISTS

Queer|Art is pleased to announce the winner of the seventh annual Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists, Marcelline Mandeng Nken. The Connecticut-based interdisciplinary artist will receive a $10,000 cash grant, professional development support, and individual studio visits with members of the judges panel to support her practice.

Grant Judge Isis Awad describes Mandeng Nken’s practice as “heartfelt, rigorous, and simultaneously tapped into ancestral memory and contemporary Black material culture. Her transdisciplinary background as a social worker and her matrilineal lineage of care-takers and nurse practitioners is evident in the meticulousness, and expansiveness of the worlds she continuously builds." Jordyn Jay adds, “her work is not just artistic, it is anthropological, informed by archival research and oral histories. She brings a rigor and depth to her practice that is so often overlooked in work created by Black trans women in favor of hollow representational politics.” Utē Petit says, “her work shifts in formation, from considering inheritance and preservation of ancestral knowledge, to proposing new modes of remembering, care and passing on. This could only come from deep attunement to the legacies of women who stand on her shoulders, the necessity of the collective to sustain life.”

Marcelline Mandeng Nken is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, new media, text, and performance. Her practice investigates how diasporic care and maintenance traditions shape conditions of belonging, especially within queer and trans lifeworlds, where home is assembled through chosen kinship. Mandeng Nken was a 2025 Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division. She is a grantee of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Leeway Foundation, and a former resident of Skowhegan, Goethe Institut Boston, Whistle Space Summer Institute, Vermont Studio Center, and SOMA Summer. Her work has been presented at MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Judson Memorial Church, Mercer Union, Karma International, Cibrian, FringeArts, MCA Chicago, and Córdova. She holds an MFA from Yale School of Art.

Upon receiving the grant, Mandeng Nken remarked, “receiving the Illuminations Grant at this stage in my career affirms the value of deeply interdisciplinary artistic research, especially as the breadth of my work resists traditional categories and disciplines. I’m immensely grateful to be part of the grant’s legacy of recognizing abstraction, embodied research, and nonlinear ways of knowing as rigorous forms of inquiry within a lineage of Black arts. This grant will allow me to expand what contemporary trans art can hold, moving beyond representation toward collective futures capable of mutating beyond official records.”

2026 ILLUMINATIONS GRANT FINALISTS

JUDGES

Originally from Jacksonville, FL, Jordyn Jay (she/her) is a curator, producer, and arts advocate 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.

Isis Awad is a curator, writer, poet, and DJ from Cairo, Egypt based in the U.S. between New York and Arizona. She’s the founder of Executive Care*, a curatorial agency at the service of trans and queer artists of color from performance and nightlife. She has curated exhibitions with Participant Inc, Visual AIDS, The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Performance Space New York, the Ford Foundation Art Gallery, and EFA Project Space. Her writing appears in BOMB magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Asia Pacific, Movement Research Journal, Topical Cream, and ART PAPERS. She is currently Editor at Participant Inc in New York. Her debut book of prose and poetry, The First Third, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books, New York in 2028.

Utē Petit (b. 1995, Southfield, Michigan) explores Black-Indigenous land-based traditions and the creation of 'Ailantha,' a free Maroon nation of heavenly beings. Her ambition is to represent lives divested from american occupation, using quilting, ceramics, drawing, installation, and farm work. Aspiring toward self-determination and reverence of and for all beings. She currently stewards her great-grandmother's and three neighbors' lots in New Orleans having rematriated family land stolen by the state of Louisiana. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018, and is currently pursuing her MFA at UCLA.

MEET THE GRANT 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.

Aaryn Lang is a Midwestern media personality, consultant, and cultural commentator with a unique gift for saying the thing everyone’s thinking—just smarter, funnier, and with better context.

Operating at the intersection of pop culture, politics, and grassroots organizing, Aaryn brings movement-level insight to mainstream conversations, cutting through the noise of virality and spectacle to get to the heart of the matter.

Her voice was forged through more than a decade of community organizing and cultural leadership. Her primary focus? Weaving the plight of Black transgender people into the larger fight for Black liberation.

Aaryn’s unique point of view has allowed her to speak at The White House, Columbia University, NYU and across platforms including The Root, them., Cosmopolitan, Allure, Mic, and MSNBC.

Aaryn hosted the New York Emmy–nominated PBS Digital series First Person. She partnered with Academy Award winning actress Anne Hathaway and Digital Media Management to create and host Miss Lang Presents, a week-long digital series spotlighting the conversations missing from the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. She also created The Illuminations Grant through Queer|Art NYC, in partnership with acclaimed artist Mariette Pathy Allen—the first U.S. arts grant established exclusively for Black trans women artists. She is currently on a fast track to becoming a darling of the cultural zeitgeist, producing thought-provoking and often hilarious content through social media.

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.

ARCHIVE

Top row, left to right: Keijaun Thomas, I Looked Up at the Sky and I, Imagined All of the Stars Were My Sisters, photo by Charles Rice, 2020; Lee Laa Ray Guillory, Adella’s Reflection, 2020; Utē Petit, Marshland Restoration Program.

Bottom row, left to right: Golden, I'm a buzz light years away from language & a land name; still from Dilating for Maximum Results (2023) by Nyala Moon; still from Love Is A Letting Go (2024) by Fatima Jamal.