WHO WE ARE
Here is the collaborative road trip team, both human and other than human entitites. This list is like the tides, dynamic and ever changing. Some of these entities will be with us all seven weeks, some will float in and float out. We welcome additional collaborators and contributors from sea to shining sea. This list will swell and could perhaps include you! Learn how you can participate.
Lead Artists
Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle live and work together in Boulder Creeks's coastal redwood forest and in an old Victorian cottage in San Francisco. Devoted to developing the ecosex movement through art, theory, practice and activism since 2004, they’ve produced numerous ecosex symposiums, ecosex weddings, workshops, lectures, walking tours, and art exhibits. Their award winning documentary, Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story has played in numerous film festivals. View the trailer here. Beth is an Art Professor at UC Santa Cruz, Annie has a Ph.D. in Human Sexuality. They aim to make the environmental movement a little more sexy, fun and diverse. You can learn more about their work here.
Lead Collaborator
Earth. Home to the place you call home, Earth has been the host to life as we know it for 3.8 billion years. Earth has been providing for us since the beginning, and this only begins to scratch the surface; the Earth will also generously offer an abundance of eco-sensual delights every day of this road trip project. Earth is an avid traveler and is excited to witness this most excellent adventure!
Lead Collaborator
Water. A slippery collaboration between the explosive elemental forces of hydrogen and oxygen, water has been engaged in a nurturing dance with life since planet earth's youth. Water's work has appeared in many venues including the polar ice caps, subterranean caverns, and your very own bloodstream. In fact, Water is so ubiquitous it lays claim to over 60% of the earth's surface more than one mile deep. As science writer Philip Ball once said, "We could better call our planet not earth but water." We are honored to collaborate with such a force of nature.
Pop-Up Walking Tour Performance Director
Joy Brooke Fairfield is a San Francisco-based director specializing in new play development and ensemble-generated work. She began directing at Harvard University. Dedicated to inventive, rigorous physical engagement with texts, Joy has trained with the SITI Company, the Double Edge Ensemble, and Richard Schechner, for whom she also assistant directed. Joy recently completed an MA from New York University in Performance Studies and is currently pursuing her PhD at Stanford University.
Ecosexual Parade Contingent Director
Saul Garcia-Lopez is co-artistic director of La Pocha Nostra. He is an extreme immigrant and a conceptual reverse wetback. He is a proud Mariachi Ecosexual from the 3 world, an experimental director, radical pedagogue, performance artist, theorist.
Cinematographer
Keith Wilson was Producer and Director of Photography for Interior. Leather Bar (2013) which premiered at the Sundance and Berlinale Film Festivals. His short documentary, The Shrimp (2010), screened at the South by Southwest Film Festival, the U.S. National Gallery of Art and won the Director’s Choice and Best Cinematography Award from the Black Maria Film Festival.
Cinematographer
Jordan Freeman is an independent videographer based in New York City. He was a primary videographer for the film Coal Country. He has also worked with Coal River Mountain Watch, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition documenting events for web release. Originally coming to the Coal River Valley from Los Angeles, CA in 2005, Freeman has spent the last seven years documenting the unfolding controversies surrounding coal mining throughout Appalachia. His most recent film, Goodbye Gauley Mountain, was produced by Beth Stephens with Annie Sprinkle.
Video Artist
Isabelle Carlier is the director of Bandits-Mages, a cultural organisation based in Bourges (Fr). Operating in the field of cinema, media arts and performing arts for 15 years, Isabelle is an experienced editor and curator of video art, media art and experimental cinema. As a video editor and curator, she's collaborated with many renowned film makers and contemporary artists (including Boris Lehman, Pacôme Thiellement, etc.). In 2009 she worked on a special project on the centenary of Pierre Schaeffer with Jocelyne Tournet-Lammer for "Mémoire de Mondes/Mémoire d’avenir" organization. Isabelle also promotes free/libre open source technologies, and experimental sound practices (experimental music, sound art, electoacoustics). She has also worked as the principal supervisor of photography for many experimental and perforative stage pieces.
Artist, Performer, and Costume Designer
Sarah Stolar is an interdisciplinary artist who works in painting, installation, video, & performance art. She has been the costume designer & collaborator of Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens since 2009. You can view her work at sarahstolar.com.
Pre-Production Fairy
Pale Breast is an emerging performance artist, model, and recent graduate of the BA Contemporary Performance Practice course at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. During the pre-production portion of this project she interned with Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle. She is excited to be exploring her budding ecosexuality! You can view her work here.
Production Assistant
Kelsey McCurdy is a feminist, performance artist, visual artist, and experimental musician with a love of the uncanny and absurd. She is inspired by surrealism, ritual, nature, the body, poetic terrorism, and those who fight to radicalize art, community, and politics with emphasis on social justice. She is currently concentrating on integrating art and community, creating space and performance that is inclusive to all. You can view her work here.
Press Agent
Kate Fritz is a fiddle and banjo player, environmentalist, and citizen diplomat who has been in the arts her whole life. Through her work in media and PR at Lady Kate Productions, her passion is amplifying the voices of independent artists who make the world funnier and more free. She has presented on musicians affected by mountaintop removal mining at TEDx and on the circus arts as a political tool at the Burning Man Center Stage Speakers Series. She has a degree in Chinese language and environmental policy.
Tour Production and Vegan Cook
Becka Shertzer has collaborated with Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle for the past 10 years. As a radical, queer artist, and vegan chef, her passion is creating community and change through art, food justice and political action. She has been inspired by her relationship to this beautiful, fierce Earth forever, and she continues to be motivated to work towards healing the overwhelming destruction of our planet. Her work investigates our relationships to food, the land, our communities, and our histories. It also looks at how accessibility to these vital resources is impacted by economics, race and gender. Becka believes that through creating art, education, getting in touch with ourselves, our bodies, and the food we eat, that we can nurture and create a new radical vision of true organic sustainability.
Performance Artist
Dragonfly is an auteur, raconteur, and provocateur; a Southern Missionary Baptist deacon’s daughter turned deaconess with The Church of Stop Shopping, and the flamboyant firebrand music and performance activist, Miss Justice Jester. She spoonfeeds her more provocative memoirs as a regular contributor to the Red Umbrella Project’s Prose & Lore Anthology series and the monthly "dark. nude. storytellers." show. Dragonfly is the proud daughter of an Army combat medic/Korea/Vietnam veteran and a homemaker/domestic. She earned a $41,000 debt for her fancy honors degree from a major public university. She calls Brooklyn and Texas home.
Documentation Assistant
Seth Andrews will be aboard this ecosexual adventure all summer taking pictures and videos of the performance art pieces. He specializes in nature and portraiture photography, and his images appear on this site. Check out his photography here or follow him on instagram @seth.temple.andrews.
Sound Artist
Mayson Tillotson is working on an ever-growing project with live and recorded sound production. They have managed and owned recording studios and live music clubs up and down the California coast as well as toured nationally and internationally, working on sound for the music, theater and film industry. Mayson is fascinated with the way the world sounds: rain on the trees, a windy day at the ocean, horses grazing on grass, fire wood burning. In this project, Mayson hopes to listen and record all the sounds the earth has to give. They believe that listening to the sounds of nature is the true hospital for souls.
Pre-production Manager
Mel Preston is an ornithologist and spends much of her time outside, listening to bird songs and collecting scientific data. From her home base in Santa Cruz, she makes art, organizes creative projects both great and small, and is a happy member of an extended family of horses, dogs, birds, salamanders, plants, and humans.
Ecosex Educator
Hannah taught the first student led class on ecosexuality titled: Ecosexuality: Queering the Path to Sustainability at UC Santa Cruz and facilitates an ecosexuality workshop at Burning Man. She pollinates the community with her ecosexiness every day and will be involved in outreach and education.
Mechanic
Aaron is a mastermind mechanic and all purpose handy-monkey-man who will fix it, move it, or build it. He will be literally keeping the show on the road.