Terry J. Allen, an artist, photographer, journalist and activist, died at her home in East Montpelier, Vt., on April 10, 2026, of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare and rapidly progressing prion brain disorder. She was 78.
Brave and independent, headstrong and altruistic, Terry traveled the world and explored the complexities of the human condition. She was at ease in war zones, art galleries, tattoo parlors, political rallies, clay studios, gun shows, dairy farms, or at the local diner talking politics and science with friends.
Although photography was a notable chapter late in her life, Terry for decades was an uncompromising news and feature reporter and editor, with bylines or images appearing in the Guardian, the Boston Globe, Harper’s, the New York Times, the Nation, Salon, New Scientist, In These Times and many other publications. More recently, she lent her activism, skills and kindness to supporting immigrants, especially farmworkers, in her home state of Vermont.
Terry could charm the edge off a cop or right-winger but wouldn’t hesitate to stand her ground with a notebook and camera before an ICE agent or soldier. She could gain the trust of a grieving war victim or irk friends by way of her blunt persona and unyielding politics.
Terry Judith Allen was born on November 24, 1947, in Fall River, Mass., where her intellectually engaged parents, Mordecai and Edith, had 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 enrolled in an intensive Japanese language program at Harvard.
By freighter and another boat, Terry made her way to Japan for an apprenticeship in pottery and engagement in Zen practice, tea ceremony and other traditions. She zoomed around Kyoto and the countryside on a Honda 350 motorcycle, even while wearing a kimono for her side gig as bar hostess catering to Japanese men with drinks and conversation. (She needed the money.)
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 a lifelong Japanese friend and artist. Terry was nothing if not adept and adaptive. To make her way in Japan, she knew to bow and utter the right formalities but nonetheless remained true to her ideals, including civil rights and opposition to the war in Vietnam.
In 1974, after six years in Japan, she returned to the U.S., making her way to Marshfield, Vt., 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, Vt., all the while continuing to make beautiful pottery.
In a major life transition, she shut down her clay practice as she completed an undergraduate degree (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, special honors) 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 journalism. She made several trips to El Salvador, working with the Mothers of the Disappeared and reporting on and photographing the horrors caused by the government’s 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 commitment to justice continued in print. She was editor at Covert Action Quarterly and at Amnesty International’s U.S. publication, Amnesty Now, and was an editor and a regular columnist on the politics of medicine and science at In These Times. For years she edited and produced the Hightower Report, did layout and editing work for Fairness and Accuracy in Media, and was a news editor at the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.
In recent years, Terry was rarely anywhere without a camera. As she eased out of print journalism, she specialized in the photography of human triumph or poignancy in the face of repression or devastation. She was a fixture at political protests, candlelight vigils and natural disasters.
Terry leaves behind a legacy of investigative journalism, art, activism, friendships and photography, much of which will remain at her Substack, called Opposable, and her Flickr site. From a life of art, journalism, activism and community, Terry revealed for us a world beautiful, flawed, hardened and easily broken.
In the short time between Terry’s diagnosis and her 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.
Terry is survived by many friends and colleagues and her brother, Jonathan Allen, and his wife, Shirley Allen, of Princeton, N.J.; her niece, Laura Allen; and her husband, Jay Weedon of Brooklyn.