Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Performance, film, photography, video, installation
Website: anniesprinkle.org
Annie Sprinkle was born Ellen F. Steinberg on July 23, 1954, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She began her career as a sex worker in 1973, working as a pornographic film actress and sex educator over two decades. During that period she became one of the first performers in the adult film industry to engage seriously with feminist theory and art practice, developing her own distinctive voice as a performer, writer, and educator. In 2002 she earned a Ph.D. in Human Sexuality from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco — the first known adult film performer to achieve a doctorate — cementing her transition from industry insider to credentialed academic and artist.
Sprinkle lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area and in the Santa Cruz mountains, in close collaboration with her wife and long-term creative partner, artist and UC Santa Cruz professor Beth Stephens. The two began collaborating in 2002 and have developed one of the most distinctive and widely exhibited partnerships in contemporary queer and environmental art. Together they founded the Love Art Laboratory (2004–2011), a seven-year durational project that used weddings, performances, and installations to explore the intersection of love, politics, and art. In 2008 they co-founded the Ecosex Movement and launched what would become an ongoing series of “weddings to the natural world,” including performances at the 53rd Venice Biennale and at documenta 14.
Sprinkle has received numerous honors recognizing her sustained contributions to art, activism, and human rights. She and Stephens were named 2019 Eureka Fellows by the Fleishhacker Foundation and received John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships in 2021 for Film and Video. Sprinkle has also been recognized with the Kathy Acker Excellence in Avant-Garde Award, the Performance Studies International Artist/Activist/Scholar Award, and the Tom of Finland Lifetime Achievement Award. Her archive spanning 1967–2010 is held at Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library.
Annie Sprinkle works across performance art, documentary film, photography, video, installation, and writing — often simultaneously and within a single project. Her practice is rooted in autobiography and radical transparency: she has long used her own body, sexuality, and personal history as primary artistic material, transforming the confessional into the political. Her best-known solo performances, including Post Porn Modernist (1989–1995) and the Public Cervix Announcement — in which she invited audiences to view her cervix with a speculum and flashlight — combined humor, provocation, and a deeply feminist politics of the body. Over six years of touring, she showed her cervix to more than 40,000 people across 21 countries.
In her collaborative work with Beth Stephens, Sprinkle has moved from the interior politics of the body toward the exterior politics of the environment. Their Ecosex practice extends erotic and relational frameworks to the natural world — the ocean, mountains, earth, and fire — arguing that treating the earth as a lover rather than a resource demands both ethical commitment and bodily pleasure. This work unfolds through documentary films, performance rituals, immersive installations, public walking tours, and participatory workshops. The aesthetic is celebratory, queer, and deliberately accessible, insisting that environmental activism can be joyful, sexy, and inclusive. Their trilogy of ecosexual documentaries — Goodbye Gauley Mountain (2013), Water Makes Us Wet (2017), and Playing with Fire (2025) — each use a specific natural element as lens for examining environmental crisis and community resistance.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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