Pia Paulina Guilmoth was born in 1993 and lives in rural Maine. She makes work thinking about gender, ritual, class, dysphoria, euphoria, beauty, and relationships to the land. Pia uses large-format photography, sculpture, and collaged found ephemera gathered while wandering around the backroads.

Guilmoth has published four monographs. Her third book titled Flowers Drink the River, which was released in November 2024, received the Jurors' Special Mention from Aperture's 2025 PhotoBook Awards. Guilmoth has won a Google/Aperture Creator Labs grant and a Peter Reed Foundation grant in photography. In 2022 she was a MacDowell Fellow in Visual Arts. From 2018 to 2021 she was the winner of the Fujifilm Young Talent Award, a Mass Cultural Council fellow in photography, and a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize.

News:
New book out: Fishworm by Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire, published by Void.

pia paulina guilmoth
@p_guilmoth

Flowers Drink the River
Project Statement

I started Flowers Drink the River in 2022, just a few months before I began my gender transition and started taking hormones. Before that, I had taken almost two years off from creating anything. I was in a really bad place, both mentally and physically. I didn’t have much of a community or any role models to look up to or turn to regarding transitioning.

I had lost my job, moved out of my housing, and was completely broke. I had to move back in with my parents in their small home in rural New Hampshire. I was living with both my parents and grandparents since they all shared the same house. It was a difficult time. I couldn’t come out to anyone because it wasn’t a safe environment to do so. I was living completely closeted, using a lot of substances, and just wasn’t in the right mindset to create art or do much of anything.

Then, in 2022, a friend called and offered me a place to live in central Maine. When I moved there, I was finally surrounded by queer and trans people. That environment gave me a new desire to live and grow. That’s when I started taking hormones and got health insurance. Being part of a community really pushed me to live as my true self and take the big, scary step of transitioning. It was overwhelming and scary. I lost a lot of people in my life through that process but also gained new friends and connections.

Flowers Drink the River starts from that point, moving to a new place, finding community, transitioning, and finally feeling able to live my life and my truth. A lot of the work stems from those initial steps. The book itself begins as soon as I moved to central Maine, where I live now. All the landscapes and people featured are those I’ve come to know, love, and consider family throughout my transition and while starting my life over again. In a way, it feels like a love letter to living my truth.