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Born in Brooklyn, New York, Joanna was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and later attended Rutgers University, where she earned a degree in English Literature. After waiting tables for a few years, Joanna took up her roommate Mitch on his idea they start a porn site together. Similar to Suicide Girls, Burning Angel features picture sets of tattooed punk rock girls and band interviews conducted by Joanna herself. Eventually, Joanna made the move into hardcore, first with Burning Angel.com: The Movie, which mimicked the content of the site by featuring band interviews intertwined with hardcore sex. Joanna herself nowhere-near resembles the stereotypical bleach blond, plastic surgery-enhanced porn star; she looks real, like one of your friends. Even the male talent, such as Burning Angel regular Tommy Pistol, are the guys you'd want to fuck, if you had the chance to.

These days, Joanna has a contract with VCA (Hustler) and regularly puts out titles such as Joanna's Angels 2: Alt Throttle, The Re-Penetrator (a remake or the Re-Animator), The XXXorcist (a re-make of the Exorcist), and Cum on My Tattoo, which incorporate plot, humor, and lots of hardcore sex. Joanna writes a monthly sex advice column for SPIN magazine and is featured in Carly Milne's book "Naked Ambition: Women Who Are Changing Pornography". Burning Angel films and performers just received 15 AVN nominations, including a best Director nod for Joanna. And she's finally launched her own website JoannaAngel.com, which features all Joanna, all the time. As she states in Naked Ambition, "I'm not so sure I started a revolution, but I know I started something pretty awesome, and most important, I feel like a true, honest-to-god feminist."

Thanks so much to Joanna for taking time from her busy schedule to do this interview for SK.

The funny thing about all this, is that I had no goals when I started BurningAngel. I really had no idea what I was doing. It was kind of just an idea me and my roommate had one day out of the blue. It is EXTREMELY difficult to start a porn stie from scratch. I don't just mean, from scratch like... without any money... we had no money AND no idea what we were doing. If we had either of those, things would have gone a lot smoother. Looking back on it now, our ignorance was really funny, and lots of fun... but I wouldn't recommend that route to anyone else. I think the smartest way to start a business is with lots of money, and lots of knowledge.... I would really recommend to others to do a lot of research before they start a company. Had I have done that, it would have prevented at least a fraction of the errors that occurred in the beginning

2) What kind of background did you come from? Did you ever imagine yourself as a porn star when you were growing up?

No, I never had any aspirations to do porn. I never really knew what I wanted to do, something in the writing field or something in the vain of helping other people. I watched a movie once, about this lady who taught creative writing to prisoners... and I decided that was what I wanted to do... although I found out later that prisons don't really have creative writing classes and that was just a movie. I was pretty sexually reserved for most of my life, which is probably why I enjoy performing so much. Maybe I am making up for lost times... who really knows. I really love what I do and I'm having a great time.

My family is pretty religious, we're Jewish. My mother is Israeli, of course, every family has their quirks but I think I had a pretty normal background. I went to high school, then I went to college, I graduated with a degree in English from Rutgers University and I minored in Cinema Studies. I started this company around the time I was finishing college.... I guess that's when life went from pretty normal to not so normal.

3) How does your family respond to what you do?

My mom doesn't like it... sometimes she has a hard time swallowing it. Although, to be honest.... I think that I would be weirded out if my mom was like, really really supportive. My mom is really traditional, she's worried that no one will want to marry me.... and she really wants me to get married. She loves me, she doesn't love my job, but she really wants me to be happy so when she sees that I'm happy she swallows her tongue and just deals with it. My dad is more supportive, he doesn't ask me about the dirty stuff I do (and quite frankly I have no interest in talking to him about that anyways) but he likes talking to me about my company, and likes to know how it is doing. I have a lot of extended family members (like aunts and uncles ect) that don't talk to me anymore, which kind of sucks... and what makes it really awkward is that they won't talk to my mom and dad anymore either... but I don't know. I hope that sometime in the next few years things will boil over and they'll get over it.

4) Has Burning Angel been criticized for being a knockoff of Suicide Girls? How does BA differ from that site?

Not really, because we started like a few months apart from each other and I think most people know that. There are A LOT of new websites now that get the brunt of that, not us. Also, I really think our sites our completely different. They're laid out differently, and our mantra's are different. SG doesn't consider what they do porn... and I don't either. It's really just a bunch of topless photos. BurningAngel makes realy hardcore porn, and we're proud of it. If Hardcore porn isn't your cup of tea, then BA probably isn't yours either.

5) Do you strive to bring something new and different to the porn industry with BA, i.e. plot-driven films that incorporate humor, special effects, and witty writing, as opposed to the same old boring formulaic fare? For instance, I thought the clip from "The XXXorcist" was hilarious, but I showed a friend of mine and he was thoroughly grossed-out and turned off, not understanding the humor of it at all.

Well, I make a lot of different types of movies. I have movies without real plots, like a lot of the clips on the website, or my gonzo line "cum on my tattoo" and I also have movies with plots, like Joanna's Angels, Joanna's Angels 2, Joanna Angel's Guide to Humping. I can't really take the credit for being the first person to put a plot in a porn, or even humor in a porn... lots of people do it... I'm just doing it my own way. This may sound really selfish, but half the reason I make these movies is because I really want to watch them myself. The xxxorcist is like, barely a porn. It's more like a horror movie with sex in it. We make a movie like that once a year around Halloween.

6) Who is your audience mainly? Do you try to make your films appealing to women as much as men?

I don't really know who our audience is. I know that BurningAngel.com appeals to mostly 18- 35 year old uh... hipsters? Is that what I should call them? That sounds really dirty.... you know, rock n rollers, Punk Rockers, Indie Rockers, whatever you want to call them. Mostly people in bigger cities like LA, New York, Chicago (ect) I don't think we get much traffic from the middle of America middle aged white folk who are the most common consumers of porn. However, when I started working with Hustler, and started making bigger movies that got real distribution all over the world, I think it opened up the doors and now I have a lot of different types of fans... although, I think they are more consumers of our DVD's than they are subscribers to the website.

I certainly want to appeal to both women and men. I think a lot of people think that "porn for women" needs to be like, really cheesy and soft and romantic, which pisses me off. Women can totally get off to really hot intense filthy high energy sex, and there is definitely a way to capture that type of sexuality without it coming across as degrading.

My ultimate goal is really to appeal to everyone. Of course, I want me and my friends to like my movies (and by "friends" I am also including people that I don't know at all, but would be friends with if I did) but I really do feel like I have succeeded in changing things if some middle aged republican in bumblefuck Iowa really likes my movie. It might make them more open minded in other areas of their lives.

7) How long did it take Burning Angel to really start making a profit? Is it difficult to compete with the plethora of porn sites out there?

Someone gave me very good advice once, and that was, the minute you start worrying about what other people doing is the minute you stop making money. This is an extremely competitive business (I am pretty sure any facet of the entertainment industry is though) and I really do my best to just focus on what we're doing, and not pay attention to the "competition" out there. If anything, it makes me work harder and produce better products. It lights a fire under my ass... if you know what I mean.

I still had to work a part time job for the first 2 years BurningAngel was a business. So... yeah... after 2 years we started to see a small profit. And believe me, that was a really long two years. We really started to doubt ourselves after a while... thinking we would just never make it.

8) I notice you use a lot of 'natural' actresses in your films. Are you opposed to surgically enhanced performers?

Nah- I'm not opposed to it... like I shot a girl in my last movie that had fake boobs, but it was for Cum on My Tattoo #3 (it's not out yet) and what really matters to me in that movie, is that the girl has cool tattoos, which she did. Most punk chicks don't have plastic surgery and those are the types of girls I shoot... I don't shoot very many surgically enhanced ladies but if I think someone has a good look, I'll take 'em no matter what.

9) Do you have limitations on what you will or will not show in your films?

Uh... bestiality? Things involving children? I'm pretty open minded to anything that doesn't involve those. There are some limitations... I work with Hustler, and they don't allow fisting in their films, or pissing, and some other things... oh yeah I can't put like, objects inside people... like bottles or whatever. They need to be "certified sex objects" which is kind of lame... but I think I can get over it.

10) In "Naked Ambition", you maintain that Burning Angel in its current form is feminist. What makes it so?

To answer this best, I am a feminist, I run the website. It's hard for things to be feminist, people are, but I have the final say (and most of the time the only say) on anything that we do, and I don't allow us to make any content that I think is degrading to women.

1) Have you had to fight other mainstream feminists on labeling yourself a feminist while working in the sex industry? How do you respond to them?

Not really. The only old school feminist I met is like, my great aunt, and she's like in her 60's. We got into an argument once, and I just let her win... because she was my aunt and all. I have seen some haters go on their own little tirades on message boards about how like, un-feminist I am... but I don't answer them. They're not talking to me, they're just talking to each other... If anyone wanted to talk to me about it, I would be more than welcome to the debate.

12) You wear a lot of different hats these days-as a writer, model, producer, director, porn star, and founder of a hugely successful porn site. Which do you consider to be your most important one? Which do you enjoy the most?

I enjoy writing the most. It's my favorite thing to do, and it has always been, but I really like writing about my life as a porn star, or a director (ect). I really really love performing on camera, but I know I can't do that for ever so I'm trying to do as much of it as I can right now. I know I can write for the rest of my life so my dreams of persuing a publishing deal are put on hold until my boobs start sagging.

I really love all the aspects of my career, I love coming up with ideas, I love directing movies.... I don't know. It's really hard for me to put them in any order.

13) What do see in the future for yourself and Burning Angel? Already you're one of the hottest porn stars in the country. Do you aspire to Jenna-like status?

I think every porn star aspires to be like Jenna, and I mean why wouldn't you? She is beautiful, and successful and she gets to do what she loves and she's in control of her life. I really just want to keep doing what I'm doing, and do it better.

14) As an aspiring pornographer myself, do you have any words of advice? Would you like to see more women get involved behind-the-scenes in the adult industry?

I definitely want to see more women behind the camera. My words of advice? Go with your instincts. If you feel something in your heart, even if it's totally ridiculous or seems really impossible... go for it... because you only live once.

15) Last, but not least...where did you find Tommy Pistol? And how do I get to fuck him??!

HAHAHAHAH I met him through a friend of a friend and haven't been able to get rid of him since. Just send him a message on MySpace and request his services. He's pretty easy.

© Libby

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