Erin Markey is a Brooklyn-based performing artist and writer who creates original music and knows her way around a brass pole. She was bred in Michigan and buttered in the Deep South. After the butter melted, she went back to Michigan to study at the "University of" under the brilliant, campy, sexy, hilarious mentorship of Holly Hughes. Markey's work is heavily influenced/inspired by Ms. Hughes, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, Santa Claus, Judy Garland, Annie Sprinkle, Sarah Vaughan, Tom Jones, Liberace, Kate Bornstein, Carol Burnett, and Miss Piggy. She has just returned from the controversial 2008 Sex Worker's Art Show Tour, where she performed excerpts from her newest solo musical, Puppy Love: A Stripper's Tail. Her work was recently included in the 2007 Lincoln Center Director?s Laboratory, and has been produced and showcased in galleries, museums, theatres, salons, clubs, bars, cabaret spaces, parties, and academic conferences such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Joe's Pub, Performance Studies International at Brown University, Baltimore's Walter's Art Museum, Here Arts Space, Baltimore?s Creative Alliance Gallery, The Green Room, Galapagos Art Space, Unisex Salon, 3LD, London's Club Wötever, Mo Pitkin's, and frequently at Dixon Place. Her Puppy Love: A Stripper's Tail audiobook is now on sale. Please contact Erin directly or come to a show to buy one! She is currently in the process of making Puppy Love into a movie-musical.
"Erin Markey gets guffaws on virtually every line..." --Backstage.com
"Every single one of [Markey's] lines received a huge laugh from the audience. Silly voices are a dime a dozen, but this was a real performance worthy of the warm response."
--NY Theatre
"But perhaps the very strongest and most truly Brechtian moment comes at the hand of Erin Markey... fiercely eccentric, almost androgynous roughness...indulges in some very low comedy indeed." --KDHX
"The standout performance is by Erin Markey..." --TheatreMania.
"Lovely" --Gay City News
"Vampy" -- SPIN
"Brave" --Artforum
"Performance artist Erin Markey started out with comedy, talking about trying to support herself after college by becoming a stripper. Markey had a cloud of puckish hair and dark-painted eyes, and she explained that the strip club had asked her to pick a stripper name. What she chose, she explained, was Bridget, her sister’s confirmation name and the patron saint of childbirth. At first this seemed a little sacrilegious. But then Markey started to sing.
She was topless, in gold panties and leather boots, arching her body around the golden pole. It was incredibly sexy, but it was more than that. She was singing about Bridget, the saint of childhood, and how she spread her legs, as Markey, too, slid up the pole and spread her legs wide. She kept climbing higher, looking at the audience with that sultry exhibitionist gaze but also reaching up, aiming for something more.
It was thrilling and thought-provoking and beautiful, and it was pushing beyond all these into something else, a kind of constant striving.
That didn’t just count as art, I realized, spellbound; it embodied it."
--The Harvard Crimson
Recently, Erin was on the O'Reilly Factor on FOX News. Most of her body, however, was censored, as most of her body is made out of cash-hungrey, wet, labia majora. So naturally, they had to blur her body from the neck down. See the footage below:
