Live at Knight Going to Extremes: A John Waters 80th Birthday Celebration

John Waters has written and directed sixteen movies, including Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry Baby, Serial Mom and A Dirty Shame. Both Pink Flamingos and Hairspray have been added to the U.S. Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.

He is the author of ten books: Shock Value, Crackpot, Pink Flamingos and Other Trash, Hairspray, Female Trouble and Multiple Maniacs, Art: A Sex Book (co-written with Bruce Hainley), Role Models, Carsick, Make Trouble, Mr. Know-It-All, and in 2022 his first novel, Liarmouth: A Feel Bad Romance. Liarmouth was optioned by Village Roadshow Pictures for Waters to write the screenplay adaptation and direct the movie. Picador will publish six of Waters’ screenplays as individual editions in 2025: Pink Flamingos, Flamingos Forever and Desperate Living in May, and Multiple Maniacs, Female Trouble and Hairspray in mid-October.

Two music compilation CDs curated by John Waters have been released by New Line Records, “A John Waters Christmas” (2004) followed up by “A Date with John Waters” (2007). In 2017 Third Man Records released a 7” EP of Waters reading his text “Make Trouble”. In 2021 Sub Pop records distributed his “Prayer to Pasolini” as part of its Singles Club. John’s recordings of his audiobooks “Carsick” and “Mr. Know-It-All” were both nominated for Grammy Awards in the Best-Spoken Word Album category. Sub Pop Records released the 7” single, “It’s in the Book,” in 2022, Waters’ cover of a 1952 hit comedy recording by Johnny Standley. In 2024 Sub Pop released a 7” single, “John Waters Covers ‘The Singing Dogs’ ‘Jingle Bells’” b/w “It’s a Punk Rock Christmas”.

John Waters is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, a past member of the the Andy Warhol Foundation Board and the Wexner Center International Arts Advisory Council. He is currently on the Board of Trustees for the Baltimore Museum of Art as well as the Maryland Film Festival Board and has been a key advisor to the Provincetown International Film Festival since it began in 1999, the same year Waters was honored as the first recipient of PIFF’s “Filmmaker on the Edge” award.

In September 2014 Film Society of Lincoln Center honored John Waters’ filmmaking with a 10-day celebration entitled “Fifty Years of John Waters: How Much Can You Take?” featuring a complete retrospective of his work. The next year the British Film Institute also honored John’s contribution to cinema with their own program called “The Complete Films of John Waters…Every Goddam One of Them.” In 2015, Waters was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and the same by the Maryland Institute College of Arts (MICA) in May 2016, as well as two by School of Visual Arts (SVA), in 2020 and 2022. The French Minister of Culture bestowed the rank of Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters to Mr. Waters in 2015. In February 2017 John Waters was honored with the Writers Guild of America East’s Ian McLellan Hunter Award for his body of work as a writer in motion pictures. In September 2023, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened “John Waters: Pope of Trash,” the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to John Waters’ contributions to cinema, and he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. American Cinema Editors selected Waters to receive the ACE Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year Award in 2024.

Waters is a photographer whose work has been shown in galleries all over the world since 1992. In 2011 he was selected as a juror for the Venice Biennale.

He’s performed his one man spoken-word lectures entitled “End of the World,” “This Filthy World,” “False Negative,” “Naked Truth,” or “Make Trouble” and his annual Christmas show, “A John Waters Christmas,” at colleges, museums, film festivals and comedy clubs around the world. Waters has played to sold out audiences at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Bonnaroo, Sydney Opera House, Volksbühne Berlin, and both the Southbank Centre and Barbican Hall in London. He has hosted the Mosswood Meltdown punk rock music festival for over a decade. His speaking tours have brought him in front of American MENSA and the American Association of Law Libraries as well as the Tennessee WIlliams New Orleans Literary Festival.

Waters has appeared in many motion pictures and television shows including Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown, Seed of Chucky, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, The Simpsons, Ryan Murphy’s Feud, The Blacklist, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Search Party and the Chucky TV Series. He was featured, along with Olympic gold medalist Megan Rapinoe, in the 2019 Nike X Olivia Kim commercial. With Mink Stole, he was part of the 2022 Calvin Klein Pride Campaign, and Waters was a face of the Saint Laurent campaigns in Fall/Winter 2020 and Fall/Winer 2024.