Natacha Merritt bio

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Natacha Merritt (b. 1977, San Francisco) is an artist, writer and biologist. At age 20, her intimate and explicit series of portraits and self-portraits documenting her sexual history caused a sensation when she published them on her website natacha-merritt.com. Her first book, Digital-Diaries (2000, Taschen), an erotic exploration at the dawn of the digital era, quickly became a critically acclaimed international best-seller, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and was featured in publications as diverse as The Observer, Playboy, The Wall Street Journal and Rolling Stone. She spoke at conferences as diverse as Ars Electronica on Next Sex: Sex in the Age of Procreative Superfluousness and the design conference AGideas. In 2000 she starred, shot and edited D-life (heralded as one of the first Internet reality miniseries) in collaboration with Heavy.com (later picked up by Warner Bros). 

From 2003-2004, Merritt was invited to be one of the creators for the Cirque du Soleil show Zumanity (NYNY Hotel and Casino), an exploration of sensuality and peak human performance, for which she created large-scale multimedia projections from erotic images she had captured of the performers.

In 2008 she wrote an ‘insect circus’ inspired by her observations of the insect world and celebrating the importance of biodiversity. She licensed the rights to Cirque du Soleil and the circus became OVO, still touring.

He most recent photo book, “Sexual Selection” a comparative artistic study of sex in the human, plant and insect worlds was released in May 2012.

The work incorporates scientific insights with her artistic practice unveiling an untapped sexual beauty and eroticism hidden within all species. She took the theme of Sexual Selection further by using 3D printing technologies to create never before seen sculptures of spider erections (2013).

Her most recent projects include being creative director of a live fetish arts performance, and founder of Permission®.

She currently is developing sensual games for the Oculus Rift.