Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens
2019 Eureka Fellows
Stephens & Sprinkle have been partners and collaborators for 14 years, creating performances, film, and visual art. Their most recent project involved 22 performance art weddings with nature in nine countries, celebrating an “eco-sex” movement. Stephens has a background as an interdisciplinary artist and professor at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work has explored themes of gender, queerness, and feminism. Sprinkle was a sex worker who morphed into an internationally known performance artist who toured one-woman shows about her life for fifteen years. Their award-winning documentary film about coal mining, Goodbye Gauley Mountain – An Ecosexual Love Story, was featured at many film festivals and is now on Netflix. Sprinkle received the Artist/Activist/Scholar Award from Performance Studies International, and the Acker Award for Achievement in the Avant Garde. Stephens is a Rydell Fellow and earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at University of California, Davis, in 2015. The duo has presented their work at art venues nationally and internationally, including the Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain, the Venice Biennale, Italy, and Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany. The Ecosex Walking Tour is currently touring, and they are working on a book about their work for University of Minnesota Press, titled Assuming the Ecosexual Position. *Artist biography at time of award.
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