Bev Grant (b. 1942; Portland, OR)

Bev Grant is an activist, photographer, documentary filmmaker and musician.

Raised in Portland, Oregon, Grant moved to New York City in the early 1960s, as the wife of a jazz musician. She worked as a secretary and supported first her husband then moved in with another jazz musician and supported his career. A victim of domestic abuse (both physical and psychological), Grant left him after two years in 1966, shortly after he threw away the book she was reading, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. This was just as the fervor of women’s liberation and anti-war sentiment was coming to the fore. She began attending anti-war demonstrations in 1967, and attended an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) conference at Princeton University where she attended a "Women's Liberation" workshop led by Pam (Chude) Allen, who invited her to join a consciousness raising group on the Lower East Side. Having settled on the Lower East Side, Grant immediately began attending and ultimately becoming a participant in numerous significant protest actions of the period. She began to employ her recently purchased Pentax 35mm camera to record what was clearly a historic time of political action. She joined a newly formed political documentary collective called New York Newsreel (later renamed Third World Newsreel) and began to deploy her activist experiences and documentarian eye as a photographer and filmmaker. She also contributed photos to Liberation News Service, an underground press service that distributed images and written word to the numerous political newspapers throughout the country. 

Grant lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Bev Grant

The Miss America Pageant Protest (Bras in Air), 1968

Gelatin silver print

8 x 10 in (20.32 x 25.40 cm)

Bev Grant

Pro Choice March and Rally Manhattan, 1968,

Silver Gelatin Print

10 x 8 in (25.40 x 20.32 cm)

Bev Grant

Florika Remetier, Cynthia Funk, and Flo Kennedy. Miss America Pageant Protest, Atlantic City, NJ, September 7, 1968, 1968

Silver Gelatin print

10 x 8 in (25.40 x 20.32 cm)