Terry J. Allen: A Life of Curiosity, Art, and Justice

By Bryan Pfeiffer

During one of her regular Saturday-morning breakfasts with friends at the diner, Terry Allen, invoking an idea from Martin Luther King Jr., offered up a discussion topic.

“So do you guys believe,” she asked, “that the arc of the moral universe really does bend toward justice?”

Regardless of whether the group could solve the world’s problems over coffee, eggs, and homefries, Terry never wavered from her own enduring sense of justice, even in the final weeks of her life.

An artist, journalist, photographer, and activist, Terry died at her home in East Montpelier on April 10, 2026, of a rare and rapidly progressing prion brain disorder. She was 78.

Brave and independent, headstrong and altruistic, Terry traveled the world and explored the best and worst of its people. Rarely without a camera or notepad, and never short on curiosity, she was at ease in war zones, art galleries, tattoo parlors, gun shows, dairy farms, and political rallies.

Terry could charm the edge off a cop or right-winger but wouldn’t hesitate to stand her ground before an ICE agent or soldier. She could gain the trust of grieving war victims, but could also irk friends by way of her blunt persona and unyielding politics.

Although countless Vermonters knew Terry for her photography, including substantial work here at The Bridge, her earlier passions included Japanese ceramic art and investigative journalism. Most recently, Terry offered her activism, skills, and kindness to supporting immigrants, especially farmworkers here in Vermont. Perhaps more than anything, she was curious about the dimensions of the human condition.

“She was the rare person who could go to the seediest bar or to a high-end restaurant and enjoy them both equally,” said Dorigen Keeney, a close friend for decades.

Terry Judith Allen was born on Nov. 24, 1947, in Fall River, Massachusetts, where her intellectually engaged parents, Mordecai and Edith, sought to shape their daughter according to traditional notions of success. Terry wouldn’t have it. In the late 1960s, she spent a year at the University of Chicago, tuning in, dropping out, and launching herself into arts, travel, and the counterculture. With a growing interest in pottery and Asia, she made her way by freighter to Japan for an apprenticeship in ceramics and engagement in Zen practice, tea ceremony, and other traditions.

Terry studied with Nakazato Takashi, one of Japan’s most esteemed ceramic artists, and eventually built a studio of her own outside Kyoto, fusing her rebellious Western creativity with Japan’s craft culture orthodoxy. “She brought a new, fresh wind into traditional Kyoto,” said Emiko Sawaragi Gilbert, a friend and artist who met Terry in Japan and now lives in Vermont.

In 1974, after six years in Japan, Terry returned to the U.S., making her way to Marshfield and the home of Adele Godchaux Dawson, renowned herbalist and wise woman, where Terry built a wood-fired kiln. From there, in Cabot, she shared a studio with artists Mary Azarian and Georgia Landau, and eventually bought a home in Richmond, all the while continuing to make pottery. In a major life transition, she shut down her clay practice and completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Vermont. 

Always a traveler, in 1982 she met Australian Jay Weedon at a youth hostel in Hong Kong. Together they spent three months exploring the People’s Republic of China, mostly by steam locomotive. Terry took lots of pictures on that trip — perhaps the genesis of her career in art photography, portraiture, and photojournalism. They married and lived together briefly in Vermont, then separated but never divorced. 

For the next three decades, Terry pursued art, activism, and uncompromising journalism. She made several trips to El Salvador, working with the Mothers of the Disappeared and reporting on and photographing the horrors caused by government death squads. She worked in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, capturing evocative portrait photos of Iraqis going about their lives before the American bombs began to fall.

Terry’s journalism credentials are varied, with bylines or images appearing in The Guardian, The Boston Globe, Harper’s, The New York Times, The Nation, Salon, New Scientist, The Bridge, Seven Days, and many other publications. She was editor at Covert Action Quarterly and at Amnesty International’s U.S. publication, Amnesty Now. She was also a news editor at The Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and a regular columnist on the politics of medicine and science at In These Times.

As she eased out of print journalism, Terry specialized in the photography of human triumph or poignancy in the face of repression or tragedy. She was a fixture at political protests, candlelight vigils, and natural disasters. Much of Terry’s work will remain at her Substack called “Opposable” and her Flickr site. 

In an irony not lost on her, Terry died of encephalitis brought on by Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease — something she herself covered as a science and medical writer a quarter century ago. Even though the arc of the moral universe did not always bend in her favor, from her life of art, journalism, and activism, Terry revealed for us a world beautiful, flawed, hardened, and easily broken. And in that, there is justice.

In the short time between Terry’s diagnosis and death, countless friends converged on her East Montpelier home to provide support and assistance. In particular, Aranya Phonjan, Janet Van Fleet, Dorigen Keeney, Carol Wald, and Berrian Eno-Van Fleet provided the constant care Terry needed to allow her to die at home.

“She had a great thirst for friendship and could never get too much time with her friends,” said one of those longtime friends, Janet Van Fleet of Cabot, “unless she was working on a writing or design project, and then she’d say, ‘Gotta go.’”

Terry is survived by those many friends and colleagues, and her brother Jonathan Allen and his wife Shirley Allen, of Princeton, New Jersey; her niece Laura Allen; and her husband Jay Weedon of Brooklyn, New York.