Curve Photo Contest 2026
The 2026 Curve Photo Contest submissions are now closed. Winners will be contacted in early March. The official announcement launches on April 20, 2026 in Curve magazine and in a digital exhibit at Archive.Curvemag.com. Due to the large volume of submissions, we are unable to give individual feedback.
ABOUT
The annual Curve Photo Contest is inspired by Curve magazine's 35-year legacy of depicting lesbian life. We invite community members who self-identify as lesbian, bi, trans, and queer women and nonbinary people, to participate in submitting their photographs that depict queer lives/ queer identity to be considered for the contest. The original Curve Lesbian Life photo contests ran from 1995-2006 and received thousands of mailed-in photographs. Today, we ask applicants to submit through this web portal at Archive.Curvemag.com
2026 PRIZE: Three (3) Winning Entries will have the opportunity to be displayed in-person at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), during a one-day event with The Curve Foundation on April 24, 2026, as part of Lesbian Visibility Week this year. The Curve Foundation will cover the cost of printing works for display, but not cover travel nor mailing the works back (you may choose to donate the print to The Curve Foundation).
The Winning Entries and Honorable Mentions will also be featured in an article on Curve Quarterly, published in April 2026.
All submissions will be proudly displayed in a digital exhibit on the Curve Archive website, adding to Curve's long legacy of archiving and displaying lesbian and queer life.
CRITERIA:
- Images must not be older than 5 years
- You must own the right to the image you submit
- You must self-identify as lesbian, bi, queer, trans, or nonbinary
- Your image must be representing, expressing, or depicting queerness or queer life/identity
- We do not tolerate any content that is discriminatory, hateful, or exclusionary and anti-LGBTQ