Meet Brittany Gill, the Survivor-Turned-Advocate Behind the Sash
There’s a reason the photos from the Miss Voluptuous International pageant look like a Hollywood drama. Spotlights. Nerves. A room full of glittering gowns and women trying not to let their hands shake.
And somewhere in that whirlwind—on a red carpet laid across a ballroom floor in England—Brittany Gill, representing the entire Southern United States, lay flat on her back with one shoe on and one shoe off.
Not defeated. Not dramatic. Grounded.
“I could feel the panic coming,” she said, laughing at the memory from last October. “Six judges. Four-minute rotations. I thought I was about to pass out, so I just lay down. That was the only way I was going to show up as my real self.”
She did more than show up. She won the entire international title. But that’s not the only crown Gill has earned. She earned one off stage long before that—in the dark places she survived, the daughters she’s raising, the women she’s helped heal, and the life she rebuilt from the inside out.
Gill’s story begins in LaPlace, Louisiana, where childhood peace vanished early. Her father—a hard-working business owner originally from India—was deported when she was just seven. Her mother, suddenly raising two children alone, sold their businesses, their home, and everything stable.
“It shifted something in me,” Gill said. “That’s when my trauma started. And when a child experiences trauma, it follows you.”
At 13, she met the boy who would become her abuser. They grew up tangled. Breaking up, reconciling, enduring cycles of charm, manipulation, and violence she didn’t yet have the language to identify.
“I was a child dating a child,” she said. “He made me feel like no one else would ever love me.”
The relationship consumed her teens and early twenties—until the day she found out she was pregnant. That was her line in the sand.
“I packed his bags, looked him in the eyes, and said, ‘I may not love myself enough to leave you, but I will love this child more than I’ll ever love you. And you will never hurt her like you hurt me.’”
It was the first powerful choice she ever made for her own life. She began raising her daughter, Kennedy, and built a life piece by piece. Then she met Jeramie Kelly—a Hancock County early childhood education teacher who would quietly, firmly shift her entire understanding of love.
“He told me, ‘To accept the love I have for you, you have to learn to love yourself first.’ And at first, I was like, ‘I love me some me.’ But later I realized… I really didn’t.”
With that, she got healthier, lost weight, traveled, worked out, took time for herself, journaled, explored, and breathed.
“Learning to love yourself,” she said, “isn’t about vanity. It’s about survival.”
They built a blended family with Kelly’s young daughter. And soon after, Kelly became “Dad” to Kennedy, and all together they welcomed their youngest daughter, Emersyn—the unexpected glue that brought new life to their home. And Gill petitioned to get her father back to the U.S. after 24 years of deportation—an uphill legal battle she ultimately won.
Gill is honest about healing, and she never intended to be a pageant queen. When a friend suggested Miss Voluptuous, she laughed it off. Then she learned queens had platforms—voices—and something shifted.
“I always knew I was supposed to speak to women who’ve been through what I’ve been through. I just didn’t know how anyone would take me seriously.”
She applied. She was accepted. She panicked. She didn’t have the money. She raised the money anyway. And she discovered something much bigger than a crown. She found her voice.
She walked into the Miss Voluptuous International competition—a system celebrating plus-size women, community service, and leadership—and delivered interviews so raw that three judges cried and asked for a hug.
“One told me, ‘You always had a seat at the table—you just had to believe it yourself.’”
Winning didn’t quiet her imposter syndrome. If anything, it made her want to do more. “I feel like I’m supposed to save the world,” she said. “I know I can’t, but if I help one woman remember her worth, that’s everything.”
These days, Gill serves the Gulf Coast the same way she survived trauma—heart-first. She works with survivors through the Gulf Coast Center for Nonviolence. She teaches self-care and shares her story with teens in juvenile corrections. She supports community outreach programs. She launched The HealHer Project, guiding survivors through skincare routines while sharing her testimony.
At her business, Amur Aesthetics, she treats clients like whole people, not appointments. She quietly represents strength disguised as softness, resilience wrapped in compassion, and beauty—real beauty—born from survival.
Put her in a black and white photo, she’s old Hollywood. Give her a crown, she is a queen. But talk to her—really talk to her—and you realize she’s something rarer.
A healer. A survivor. A voice. A woman who got up off the carpet and kept rising.
She’ll tell you she didn’t get here alone. The crown may sit on her head, but the hands that held her up—her daughters, her partner, her parents, her friends, her clients—are woven into every shimmer. She doesn’t take the credit. She takes the love, the support, and the belief others poured into her, and carries it forward to the women who need it next.
