Who is Maria Beatty?
Maria Beatty is a fearless visionary in erotic cinema, an artist who turns fetish, BDSM, desire, and power into pure visual poetry. She was born in Carcas, Venezuela, and lives between the Big Apple and Europe. She is a pioneer of erotic noir: Beatty draws inspiration from German Expressionism, French Surrealism, and American film noir, fusing these influences into dreamlike tableaux where eroticism becomes both ritual and revelation.
Maria Beatty began her creative journey in the 1980s New York underground, photographing musicians and performance artists on the Lower East Side before turning to filmmaking. Shooting on Super 8, she documented eccentric women and trans lives long before such representation found space on screen. In 1989, she directed Gang of Souls, a documentary on the influence of Beat poets like William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Marianne Faithfull on the artistic and musical counterculture.
Soon after came Sphinxes Without Secrets (1991) and Sluts and Goddesses (1992), films celebrating women who use their bodies as powerful tools for performance, pleasure, and protest. In 1995, Beatty conceived her first erotic film, a silent, black-and-white study of submission, scored by avant-garde composer John Zorn. This work marked the beginning of her lifelong exploration of female eroticism as ritual and revelation. Two years later, she released The Black Glove (1997), a film that would become an underground classic and help define her signature style. That same year, she founded Bleu Productions, her own distribution company devoted to lesbian porn films and queer erotic cinema. Since then, Maria Beatty has directed, produced, and performed in over thirty films, each a meditation on sensuality, power, and the endless tension between domination and surrender.
Beatty’s work is deeply personal and feminist. Rejecting the male-gaze-driven clichés of mainstream porn, she films real chemistry and real passion. “I always wanted to create my own world,” she has said. “A world where women’s desire is not performed for men, but lived, explored, and reclaimed.” For her, bondage and fetishism are metaphors. Each knot and gesture unravels hidden emotions: obsession, dependency, fear, and liberation. Her films invite viewers to join that journey, to witness the poetry that exists between control and release captured in porn.
Watch Maria Beatty’s ethical porn movies at ERIKALUST
At ERIKALUST, you can experience Maria Beatty’s exquisite craftsmanship in The Black Glove, a stunning work of erotic noir. In sensuous black and white, foot worship, gloved hands, and glistening skin transform fetish into art. Sabrina, a willing submissive, enters Mistress Morgana’s world of ritual and restraint, an elegant choreography of wax, clamps, and control.
