Leon Mostovoy is a transgender artist, photographer, and curator whose work has documented queer cultural production and political movements for decades. Beginning in the 1980s, he developed a practice rooted in queer and feminist erotic image-making, producing work for On Our Backs and Quim, designing book covers for Leslie Feinberg and Lynda Hart, and contributing to publications including Nothing but the Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image, The Portable Lower East Side, and Low Rent: A Decade of Prose and Photographs from The Portable Lower East Side. Across photography, installation, and curatorial work, Mostovoy examines transgender identity, sexuality, transformation, and gender roles in contemporary U.S. society.
His early photographic series explored the lives of women seeking strength and self-determination outside heteronormative expectations. Across his body of work, Mostovoy centers communities often excluded from mainstream representation, including sex workers, queer subjects, formerly incarcerated women, transgender men, and people affected by the AIDS pandemic.
Mostovoy has participated in more than sixty solo and group exhibitions in photography and multimedia. His collaborative work includes projects with performance artists Diviana Ingravallo, Annie Sprinkle, Julie Tolentino, and Ron Athey, as well as filmmaker Cheryl Dunye and activist Angela Davis.
In 2011, his installation Death of My Daughter was presented in Romania in support of transgender visibility and acceptance, and he presented his first retrospective, (My) Queer (R)evolution, at Temple University in Philadelphia. In 2015, photographs from the 1980s and 1990s were inducted into the ONE Archives at the USC Library, accompanied by an exhibition of his 1987–88 series Market Street Cinema.
Transfigure Project, developed in 2013 as both a book and photographic exhibition, later expanded into an interactive website to broaden access within the trans community. The project has been exhibited internationally, published in a limited edition of 250 hardbound copies, and included in the collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum.
He currently resides in Southern California.