Who

If you like your porn with a punk-rock twist, Angel's your girl: The tattooed Jewess is the co-founder of the Burning Angel adult film company and frequently stars in its pornos.

Backstory

Born Joanna Mostov in Brooklyn and raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, Angel attended religious schools before studying literature, film, and philosophy at Rutgers. As graduation approached in 2002, a friend asked if she wanted to help him start a porn site. Although she'd never watched porn before—or so she says—she agreed and later ended up posing for some photographs alongside her liberally-tatted and pierced friends on BurningAngel.com. Apparently pleased with her new career in smut, Angel held down a gig as a stripper to support herself after graduation. When she created the first Burning Angel DVD—the hardcore flick was filmed on a Brooklyn rooftop during a party—and cash started to roll in, she quit pole-dancing to focus on the site full-time. Since then, Burning Angel—along with the softcore Suicide Girls—has pioneered the so-called alt porn movement, ditching porn's traditional bleached-blonde-and-silicone image in favor of tattoos, piercings, and punk rock. In addition to directing and performing in Burning Angel productions such as The XXXorcist and the straightforwardly named Cum On My Tattoo, Joanna now manages its stable of over 130 porn stars. She also blogs for BA's website and has served as a sex columnist for Spin.

Trophy case

Angel won the "Most Outrageous Sex Scene" prize at the 2006 AVN awards for her role in the critically acclaimed splatter-porn flick Re-Penetrator. The film is the light-hearted tale of a cadaver who is brought to life by a mad scientist, only to rip out his organs following twenty minutes of hardcore sex.

Personal

Angel says she still speaks to her Orthodox parents, despite the fact they're appalled by her job. ("They are taking advantage of her sick mind," her mother cried plaintively in a Jewcy interview. "I believe that my dear Joanna is crawling with the sheretzim—the animals that live in the dirt and sewers.") As for romance, Angel demands that prospective boyfriends be able to beat her SAT score (1580) and number of tattoos (seven).

Habitat

Burning Angel remains a New York affair, but Angel herself is bicoastal; she keeps a place in adult industry hub LA in addition to her Williamsburg office/apartment.