Collected Item: “My Queer Truth”
Your Name
Teresa Pilgrim
Your Pronouns
she/they
Instagram handle, if any
@pilgrim_teresa
Work Title
My Queer Truth
Work Year (We are not accepting images older than 5 years)
2025
[Image Rights] Do you confirm that you hold the rights to this image?
Yes
[Eligibility] The Curve Photo Contest proudly centers and uplifts people who identify as lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer women and nonbinary people. Please share how you self-identify, using language that feels most accurate to you. Feel free to include all intersections of your identity. (Examples: lesbian, trans person of color, Latinx queer woman, radical faery, butch, etc.)
Trans nonbinary queer woman
[Artist Statement] Tell us more about your photo by sharing a brief artist statement OR answering this prompt: "This is what being ______ means to me..." (Max. 100 words)
This photo of my triptych of tattoos - featuring Joan of Arc holding the trans flag as the centrepiece – is part of an ongoing act of reclamation of my desecrated queer body. A recurrent motif in my work as a medievalist, transfeminist scholar, creative practitioner and activist, I took this self-portrait for my June 2025 exhibition 'My Queer Truth', an exhibition of my zines with Blossom LGBT, UK. My zines navigate personal and political embodied responses to the extreme, sustained trauma of the 'corrective' gender and identity-based conversion violence that I suffered while growing up. This photo is queer testimony.
[Visual Description] Describe your photo so we can provide alt-text. Example: "Two women holding hands and smiling as they walk in a pride parade, surrounded by rainbow flags."
A monochrome self-portrait of a trans nonbinary queer woman with a chest tattoo of St Joan of Arc, holding a trans flag, showing above the lowered edge of their shirt. The surrounding doorway and fairy lights in the background are slightly blurred.
[Agreement] In the event that you win the 2026 Curve Photo Contest, do you consent to having your photograph printed for the sole purpose of displaying at The Curve Foundation's one-day event at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA) during Lesbian Visibility Week? The Curve Foundation will cover printing costs, but will not cover costs for mailing the print after the event ends.
Yes
[Agreement] Do you consent to The Curve Foundation storing, sharing, and using this image and its description as we deem appropriate, including disseminating on our social media, website, and Curve Archive and Curve Quarterly?
Yes
[Agreement] By checking 'I understand' below, I acknowledge that this contest upholds values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and I confirm that my submission does not contain anti-LGBTQ+ or other discriminatory, hateful, or exclusionary content.
I understand