The Basic Rundown
Audacia Ray edits the Village Voice sexuality blog Naked City and produces the weekly video show Naked City TV. She is the author of Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing In on Internet Sexploration and is the award-winning director and producer of the porn feature The Bi Apple. Audacia is a former sex worker who was an executive editor at $pread magazine for three years and is now on the board of advocacy organization Sex Work Awareness, for which she edits the public education blog Sex Work 101. She has blogged on her website WakingVixen.com for nearly four years and launched her all-review video podcast LiveGirlReview.com in November 2007. She also curates bi-monthly erotic art shows at Arena Studios. She is based in New York and can be emailed at dacia[at]wakingvixen[dot]com.
Check out a full portfolio of projects, with links to press, at AudaciaRay.com
The Long Version
Clamor Magazine has called Audacia a “Jill of all media trades,” and her work has been covered by the New York Times, Oprah Magazine, Wired, Bitch, National Public Radio, Playboy Radio, Geraldo at Large, Sex TV, and many others. In addition to her media appearances, Audacia is a frequent speaker at universities and conferences, and has given talks at New York University, Rutgers University, San Francisco State University, and many others.
Audacia dipped her toes into the vast world of sexuality in 2001 when she started working as a researcher at the then-nascent Museum of Sex during her senior year at the New School’s Eugene Lang College, where she obtained a BA in Cultural Studies in 2002. At MoSex, she got paid to sift through collections of dirty pictures in New York City’s museums and public libraries, visit eclectic and enthusiastic sexual ephemera collectors and started cataloging one of the world’s largest porn collections. After leaving MoSex in 2003, she shed the academic veneer of sexuality research and dove headlong into doing public relations, model and production management for a Manhattan-based porn company. She also became a volunteer community educator for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the oldest AIDS service organization in the United States, and received training in risk reduction practices at the Harm Reduction Training Institute. She also began to support herself by doing sex work, including nude and alt porn modeling among other things. Audacia began her MA in American Studies at Columbia University in 2004 and studied at the Summer Institute on Sexuality, Culture and Society at the Universiteit van Amsterdam in the summer of 2005.
In early 2005 Audacia began to work with $pread magazine, and her gig writing news blurbs for the magazine developed into her position as News & Shorts Editor and then Executive Editor. During her tenure, which ended in January 2008, the magazine won the Utne Independent Press Award for “Best New Title” in 2005 and was named “Best Sex Worker Support System” in the 2006 Village Voice Best Of issue. To celebrate $pread’s first birthday, Audacia curated a now annual art show, Sex Worker Visions which opened with great fanfare at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in New York in March 2006 and ran through May 2006. She takes pride in assisting sex workers in developing their voice and their writing skills, and along with her fellow executive editor developed the workshop “Journalism for Sex Workers,” which they taught at the Re-visioning Prostitution Policy conference in Las Vegas in July 2006.
In the summer of 2006 Audacia wrote, directed and produced her first feature adult film, “The Bi Apple,” a bisexual romp that takes place in New York City. The film was released by Adam & Eve Pictures in February 2007 and went on to win the Feminist Porn Award for Hottest Bi Sex Scene in June 2007 and be nominated for the GayVN award for Best Bisexual Release. She spent the fall of 2006 writing her first book, Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration, about female sexuality and the internet, published by Seal Press in June 2007. Audacia was also a contributor to the Gawker media owned porn blog Fleshbot from August 2006 to August 2007.
Presently, Audacia produces and hosts an all-review video blog, Live Girl Review, and curates bimonthly erotic art shows at Arena Studios in SoHo.
