Short Bio
Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle have created multi-media art projects about love, sex, and queer ecologies together since 2002. Annie was a sex worker from 1973 to 1995 and morphed into a feminist performance artist and sex educator. In 1994, Beth became a professor of sculpture and intermedia at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she still teaches and directs the E.A.R.T.H. Lab. These days the duo make environmental films with an ecosexual gaze; they also create theater, performance art, eco-activism, and produce symposiums and workshops. Their Wedding to the Earth and the Ecosex Manifesto launched the Ecosex Movement in 2008. Notably, they were official documenta 14 artists, received a 2019 Eureka Fellowship, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. Their new book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position—the Earth as Lover, available at the University of Minnesota Press, chronicles their epic love story and art/life adventures.
loveartlab.org (archived work)
elizabethstephens.org, anniesprinkle.org (older solo work)
Individual Bios
Elizabeth M. Stephens is a filmmaker, artist, and professor in the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. While serving as departmental chair, she developed and gained administrative approval for a new MFA in Environmental Art and Social Practice. This unique program launches Fall 2021. Stephens grew up in the heart of rural West Virginia’s coalfields where she forged deep bonds with the Appalachian Mountains, as well as with miners, labor activists, environmentalsists, and other mountaineers. These connections inform her ecological knowledge and familiarized her with the use and abuse of corporate propaganda and governmental sleights of hand that turn many people against their own self-interests, and especially ecological ones. Stephens earned a PhD in Performance Studies from UC Davis in 2015 and this intensive philosophical study (focused on environmental art and social justice) honed her understanding of how systemic settler colonial practices, racism and poverty are deeply intertwined with environmental justice. After concentrating on visual and performance art, Stephens produced and directed her first feature documentary, Goodbye Gauley Mountain with Sprinkle. This film won the Santa Cruz Film Festival’s Spirit of Action Prize, a John Michaels Award for Environmental Justice from the Big Muddy Film Festival and was nominated for an environmental prize in the Sheffield Doc Fest in England. Stephens and Sprinkle completed their second feature documentary film, Water Makes Us Wet in 2017. It premiered at documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany and then went on to screen at MoMA, the British Film Institute and the Berlin Festspiele. Stephens was the recipient of the Rydell Fellowship in 2014 and in 2019, she and Sprinkle were awarded the Fleishhacker Foundation’s Eureka Fellowship. During the summer of 2018, they filmed and produced over 64 interviews with environmental/ecological artists throughout the United States. Initially intended for Stephens’ online Environmental Art course, these interviews now form an extensive archive from which their new film will draw. While Stephens served as chair (2017-2020), she and Sprinkle completed their book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. It is currently available for purchase at the University of Minnesota Press. In 2021 Stephens was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship with Annie Sprinkle for their new film, Playing with Fire.
Annie M. Sprinkle is an internationally known multi-media artist whose work is often studied in History of Performance Art classes, gender studies and film studies at major Universities/Colleges. Sprinkle has continuously toured one-woman theater performances about her life since 1989, such as Post Porn Modernist and Hestory of Porn. One of the pivotal players in the 80’s “sex positive feminist movement,” Ms. Sprinkle’s art work has long championed sex education and equal rights. The film she produced and directed, The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop has played in well over 100 film festivals, at museums and galleries, including at the Guggenheim in NYC. She became the first sex film star to successfully bridge into the world of art, and to earn a Ph.D., which she was awarded from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, in 2002. She is a popular visiting artist at many Universities. Annie Sprinkle’s autobiographical book, Post Porn Modernist broke new ground in art books that include sexually oriented imagery. Her book, Hard Core From the Heart; The Pleasures, Profits and Politics of Sex in Performance was published by Continuum Press for the academic market and won the Firecracker Alternative Book Award (2002). Stephens and Sprinkle completed their book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover while in lockdown in 2020. It is currently available for purchase at the University of Minnesota Press. For more information about Annie Sprinkle, go to: anniesprinkle.org.