Annie Sprinkle - Life and Career

Life and Career

Sprinkle was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is known as the "prostitute and porn star turned sex educator and artist." Her best known theater and performance art piece is her Public Cervix Announcement, in which she invites the audience to "celebrate the female body" by viewing her cervix with a speculum and flashlight. She also performed The Legend of the Ancient Sacred Prostitute, in which she did a "sex magic" masturbation ritual on stage. She has toured one-woman shows internationally for 17 years, some of which were are titled Post Porn Modernist, Annie Sprinkle's Herstory of Porn, Hardcore from the Heart, and Exposed; Experiments in Love, Sex, Death and Art.

Her work and publications, spanning almost four decades, are studied in courses at numerous universities, in theater history, women's studies, and film studies courses. She also is a faculty member at The New School of Erotic Touch.

Annie Sprinkle began working at the ticket booth at Tucson's Plaza Cinema at 18, when Deep Throat was playing. The film was busted, and when Sprinkle had to appear in court as a witness, she met and fell in love with Deep Throat's director, Gerard Damiano, and became his mistress, following him to New York City where she lived for twenty years. Annie's first porn movie was Teenage Deviate, which was released in 1975. Perhaps her best known mainstream porn featured role was in Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle (co-directed by Sprinkle and sexploitation veteran Joseph W. Sarno) which was the #2 grossing porn film of 1981.

In 1991, Sprinkle created the Sluts and Goddesses workshop, which became the basis for her 1992 production The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop – Or How To Be A Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps, which was co-produced and co-directed with videographer Maria Beatty, and featured music by composer Pauline Oliveros. Sprinkle pioneered new genres of sexually explicit film and video such as edu-porn, gonzo, post porn, xxx docudrama, art porn, and feminist erotica.

She starred in Nick Zedd's experimental films War Is Menstrual Envy (1992), Ecstasy In Entropy (1999), and Electra Elf: The Beginning (2005).

She has appeared in almost 200 films, including hard and softcore pornography, B movies, loops, numerous documentaries, various TV shows including four HBO Real Sex programs. She has produced, directed, and starred in several of her own films, such as Annie Sprinkle's Herstory of Porn, "Annie Sprinkle's Amazing World of Orgasm, and "Linda/Les & Annie--The First Female to Male Transsexual Love Story". These films played in hundreds of film festivals, in museums and galleries. Her work in adult films has earned her a spot on the Adult Star Path of Fame in Edison, New Jersey, she's in the AVN Hall of Fame, the XRCO Hall of Fame. For three decades she has presented her work as a visiting artist at many major universities and colleges in the USA and Europe. Currently her lecture presentation is called "My Life and Work as a Feminist Porn Activist, Radical Sex Educator, and Ecosexual." She also has done dozens of "Free Sidewalk Sex Clinics," offering free sex education to the public in public space.

Sprinkle's work has always been about sexuality, with a political, spiritual, and artistic bent. In December 2005, she committed to doing seven years of art projects about love with her wife and art collaborator, Beth Stephens. They call this their Love Art Laboratory. Part of their project was to do an experimental art wedding each year, and each year had a different theme and color. The seven-year structure was adapted to their project by invitation of artist Linda M. Montano. Sprinkle and Stephens have done fifteen art weddings, eleven with ecosexual themes. They married the Earth, Sky, Sea, Moon, Appalachian Mountains and the Sun in six different countries. These weddings are well documented at www.loveartlab.org

According to John Heidenry, Annie Sprinkle was the lover of the Dutch artist, and European Chairman of the Fluxus art movement, Willem de Ridder, and of the erotic writer and author Marco Vassi. Sprinkle has also long championed sex worker rights and health care. She worked as a prostitute from 1973 until 1993.