Joanna Angel is featured on the cover of the August 2019 issue of AVN magazine. Click here for the full digital edition. Photos by Keith Ryan.
The Princess of Punk Porn. The Queen of Alt. The Grande Dame of Tattoos.
Whatever such title has at one point or another become synonymously tied to Joanna Angel, she has always maintained one signature attribute as the core of her image: marching boldly, often defiantly, to the beat of her own drum.
It was that spirit, of course, which stoked her—along with Rutgers University classmate Mitch Fontaine, who joined her this year in the AVN Hall of Fame—to launch a renegade little website in 2002 called BurningAngel.com.
“My entire life existed in this bubble called the punk scene,” Joanna recalls. “It was a subculture that encompassed my whole life. In the original inception of BurningAngel we called ourselves ‘punk porn.’ There was a particular aesthetic to girls you would see at punk/metal shows (me kind of being one of them) that my peers and I would call ‘scene girls’ and these were the original BurningAngel girls.”
In much the same pound-the-pavement manner that a young journalism graduate by the name of Paul Fishbein got his fledgling circular Adult Video News in front of people roughly two decades earlier, Joanna imparts, “BurningAngel got its first fan base from literally me going to shows and handing out physical flyers. It sounds so absurd when I think about it now!”
Absurd or not, it struck a chord. The only question was, what chord, exactly? “I think no one quite knew how to put a label on it,” Joanna reflects. “In the first few years of the site’s launch, there weren’t even any videos at all there. Our first DVD came out in 2005 … BurningAngel only had photo updates from its inception to that time. It’s hard to go back to the brain I had in 2002, but I really wanted to show the world what my version of sexy was. I wanted to work for myself, and I didn’t want to do what ‘society expected me to do’ … or something. I wanted to do something punk.”
And that was the guiding principle by which she led her career as a performer/director/writer/all-around-mogul for the next decade and a half or so. But then came a turning point—of sorts. As Joanna explains it, “I started to feel like I was limiting myself … and for a while I was a slave to my own brand. Sometime in the past year I said fuck it, I’m just going to do what I want—which is the ideology punk rock taught me when I was about 15.”
So for the first time since her early porn days, she began making herself available to other companies, both as a performer and a director. She shot for Brazzers, Hard X, Evil Angel and as one of the leads in Ricky Greenwood’s grindhouse-style roller derby drama Talk Derby to Me for Sweetheart Video—which landed her a 2019 AVN Best Girl/Girl Sex Scene nom for her shower tryst with fellow industry icon Stoya. She also wrote and directed the dramas Corrupted by an Angel for Penthouse and A Trailer Park Taboo for Pure Taboo, the latter racking up a whopping nine AVN Award nominations in this year’s race.
The biggest transition of all, however, came in January, when she sold BurningAngel to Pure Taboo parent company Gamma Entertainment. While a fundamentally tectonic shift for Joanna personally—it does mean, after all, that she’s no longer working for herself, at least when it comes to BurningAngel output (she did start up a new label, Sex Unfiltered, for select projects she wishes to produce and own)—as she sees it, the move has wrought little if any impact for devout BurningAngel loyalists.
“Honestly I don’t think a lot of the fans know that the company was sold—the productions have continued to go on in the same way they were handled before,” she conveys. “I mentally prepared myself to get a lot of slack from old-school BurningAngel fans, but I honestly haven’t heard any feedback—either negative or positive! So thankfully, the horny alt-loving fans are unaffected and they will continue to get their regular dose of BA that they’re used to.”
Meanwhile, those fans will continue to see her popping up in all sorts of other new places, thanks to her recently having signed on with talent agent extraordinaire Mark Spiegler.
“I remember on one of my very first sets I was ever on, the makeup artist was talking about someone becoming a Spiegler Girl,” Joanna relates. “I asked, ‘What’s a Spiegler Girl?’ and she replied, ‘Oh, Spiegler is the number one agent in porn. His girls are always on time and they always do anal.’ So I hope I am carrying on the old school Spiegler torch by continuing the lineage of girls he has represented who were always on time, and did anal.”
“But in all seriousness,” she continues, “I’ve always wanted to be a Spiegler Girl and I’m really honored to be on the roster. I’m 38 years old, I want to really go full steam with however many realistic years I have left with performing, and I knew he was the right person for me to do it with.”
To name just a few of the wildly varied productions of late in which Joanna’s fan legion should look for her, there’s the Mike Quasar-directed romance Love Song from Wicked Pictures, the Digital Playground action/thriller You Will Regret This from director Billy Visual, helmsman Chris Streams’ self-explanatory Evil Angel release Double Anal Divas (in which, she cracks, “I played the role of a girl who got two dicks in her ass at the same time … and it was fucking awesome”) and her own BurningAngel action/thriller Insomniac.
In addition, she continues to gain new fans by way of the two extracurricular projects that earned her 2019 nominations in the newly introduced AVN Award category Mainstream Venture of the Year: her whiskey brand Doom’s, created and operated jointly with her husband Aaron Thompson (aka Small Hands), and available for shipping anywhere in the U.S. at DoomsWhiskey.com; and her novel Night Shift: A Choose-Your-Own Erotic Fantasy, which made its way this spring onto Cosmopolitan’s list of the world’s top 29 “must read” erotic novels. What’s more, she hints that there’s a follow-up novel on the way: “I’m contractually obligated to finish another one before the end of the year. I should definitely get started on it. I actually literally went to sit down to get started on the book and decided to do this interview instead.”
When an angel spreads her wings, it might be said, there is no place for her to go but up, and that’s exactly what the Pornoverse should expect to see from Joanna Angel in this new chapter of her career.
“I am excited to work on new projects and continue to expand my own brand, and be a good whore on set for other people’s projects,” she says. “I am incredibly thankful to have the opportunities that I do, I am so thankful for all the fans and friends I have made over the years who all have inspired me and helped me become the Joanna Angel I am today.
“I truly love this industry. I love directing, performing, writing and creating. I just want to keep going, and enjoying this ride for as long as I can. Even though I feel a bit like I’m the Van Wilder of porn, I am not done here and I have so much left to do.”
