Pia Paulina Guilmoth lives and makes art in a 200-year-old shoe factory in rural Western Maine. She works with a 4x5 camera and various experimental analogue techniques in her practice. Her work is foremost about beauty, and her experience as a transsexual woman in the small town she lives in. Guilmoth's work and life are shaped by her rural roots, working class histories, practical escapism, and her devotion to preserving life in the countryside.
Her work is held in the permanent collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Guilmoth released her third book in November 2024 with Stanley/Barker titled "Flowers Drink the River," which received the Jury’s Special Mention for the 2025 Paris-Aperture Book of the Year award and is featured in ICP's upcoming exhibition Photobooks USA. In 2024/2025 she had two major solo exhibitions open in London, and New York City with CLAMP Gallery, and Webber Gallery. Guilmoth’s fourth monograph, a collaborative project with Jesse Bull Saffire titled "Fishworm," was published with Void at the end of 2025, and is shortlisted for the Les Rencontres Arles Book Award. In spring 2026, Guilmoth lectured at the Forum on Contemporary Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Guilmoth’s out-of-print monograph from 2021, "At Night Gardens Grow," was re-issued in summer 2026 with Stanley/Barker books. In 2024, she won a Google/Aperture Creator Labs grant, and a Peter Reed Foundation grant in photography, and in 2022 she was a MacDowell Fellow in Visual Arts.
