Mariette Pathy Allen is a graduate of Vassar College and the University of Pennsylvania where she received a MFA in painting. She won a New York State Council on the Arts grant in 1988, and in 1989, her book, Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them, was published by E.P. Dutton, Inc. Her second book, The Gender Frontier published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany, won a 2004 Lambda Literary Award. Ms. Allen has been a consultant and still photographer on five films; “Southern Comfort”, the most recent, won the 2001 Sundance documentary award. Her photographs have been included in a number of national and international exhibitions and is in the permanent collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the George Eastman House, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum, Frankfurt, among others.

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Mariette has lived and worked with "the transgender community” as a photographer, writer, advocate, ally and friend for over 30 years. Although most of her work has been in the U.S.A., she has been photographing gender variant people from other countries as well, and most recently in Cuba. Cuba is a country transitioning from strict communism to a more relaxed form of it. At the same time, sexual minorities in this macho-inclined country are becoming more visible and less despised.