John Waters (American, born April 22, 1946) is a filmmaker, visual artist, and writer. Born in Baltimore, MD, Waters began the rise to prominence and gained a cult following in the 1970s, with his audacious, so-called “trash films.” His 1972 film, Pink Flamingos, is notorious for its reliance on shock value and repulsive imagery. While Waters attended New York University for a brief period of time, his true inspirations in the realm of filmmaking included Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, the film The Wizard of Oz, and an appreciation for both high-brow, artistic films, and more disreputable, exploitation films.

As his filmmaking career progressed, Waters’ work took on a more mainstream sensibility. Some of Waters’ best-known films, which often include the same cast or recurring actors, include Hairspray (1988), Cry-Baby, (1990), and Serial Mom (1994). In the early 1990s, Waters began to create installation art, sculpture, and photo-based projects. The works are frequently humorous and campy, such as Rush (2009), a vastly oversized, upended bottle of a spilled sex drug, and La Mer (2009), an equally large tub of the infamously expensive brand-name facial moisturizer. These works appeared as part of the 2009 exhibition, Rear Projection, which was held simultaneously at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York and the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, CA. Waters’ work has been displayed at various venues, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA, and the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, MO. Waters’ autobiography, Role Models, was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2010.