Annie Sprinkle

Annie Sprinkle’s incredible career has seen her go from sex work to adult movies to becoming a renowned sexologist, artist, and author. She became the first-ever adult movie star to get a PhD and has spent the last 20 years working as a feminist performance artist in collaboration with her wife, Beth Stephens. She is an ecosexual and sex-positive feminist and recently co-authored the book Assuming the Ecosexual Position: Earth as Lover. She has more than 50,000 followers across various social media platforms.

Born in Philadelphia in 1954, Sprinkle worked as an adult film actress (appearing in more than 200 films) and sex worker from the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s. She became known for developing a “self-help” style of pornography, encouraging audiences to explore pleasure. She gained a PhD in Human Sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco and became a noted artist, helping to launch the Ecosex Movement with Stephens during the late 2000s and becoming a key voice in the post-pornography and lesbian pornography movements.

Sprinkle and Stephens are official documenta 14 artists. They have been awarded prestigious Eureka and Guggenheim Fellowships for their work and achievements. Their work as ecosexuals has also seen them become strongly aligned with contemporary environmental activism — ecosexuality posits that humans are in a two-way relationship with the Earth — and ecofeminism.