2025 Artist in Residence: Photo Essay

NMR is a shared space among academics, artists, and activists to highlight and discuss their work. The artist in residence is chosen each year to share their work with the journal’s readership. Their work will be featured both in the print journal and on the website.

The North Meridian Review’s 2025 Artist in Residence is Alessandra (Grim) Grima.

Grima is a multidisciplinary artist whose work moves across performance, self-portraiture, and visual storytelling. The series featured in North Meridian Review presents a collection of black-and-white nude photographs taken during her cancer treatment, in which her body is placed in intimate dialogue with the form of a cello. The images foreground endurance and vulnerability, juxtaposing the physical realities of illness with the elegance and structure of form. Across her broader practice, which includes burlesque, adult performance, and sex work, Grima interrogates embodiment, desire, and agency, insisting on the body not as object, but as site of persistence, labor, and art.

“Fat women have been a joke long enough and we're not laughing anymore. Okay? Because fat people before activism were the butt of the jokes. I mean, we still are, but now it's like, ‘You know what? Maybe I'm not feeling funny today and there's other aspects of my personality and that doesn't make me worth less…’ We are tired and we are agitated and it's not funny anymore.” -Alessandra Grima

“It took me eight months to be diagnosed with a cancer that can kill me in as soon as six to twelve months. I mean… that sentence alone… it took me three months to get an ultrasound… It took another month for me to even see a surgeon. They told me I had heartburn and I had to lose weight is what they basically... They were like, ‘Go gluten free.’ … I went off bread. I had listened to them. But a lot of people look at me and assume I eat like shit which even if I did, none of your business, but I did take the advice and they were going to do surgery on me without doing a biopsy.” -Alessandra Grima

“I asked for a second opinion. And the second opinion in Boston was like, ‘They didn't test what this is?’ And the second doctor got me a biopsy and they're like, ‘Yeah, you have cancer and now it's five centimeters” … I didn't even have surgery till two months later. People don't realize, I literally would have been dead. I mean, literally, would not be here having this conversation with you.”

The sad part is if this had happened to me ten years ago, I'd be dead. I'd be like, ‘I need to lose weight. I'm too fat.’ And you can find multiple stories of fat women dying that didn't get listened to… it happens all the time and that's why this isn't a joke. We're not “funny” as fat people. This is very serious… it's life and death serious.” -Alessandra Grima