Jo Weldon

Weldon is co-executive director of education at the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, Nevada. She has judged and coordinated judging for the Hall’s Miss Exotic World Pageant. In 2012 she was awarded the Sassy Lassy Award for Recognition of Outstanding Contribution to the Art of Burlesque.

Weldon is the founder of Pink Light Burlesque, an organization to provide burlesque classes free of cost to breast cancer patients and survivors. The first Pink Light Burlesque showcase in December 2011 was featured in TIME. Pink Light Burlesque classes have beeb held in Seattle, New York and New Zealand.

Weldon is author The Burlesque Handbook (HarperCollins/ItBooks 2010), which developed from a compilation of her class handouts and from a 50-page ebook that she had already produced covering technique and performance. It has a foreword by comedian Margaret Cho.

Weldon is an educator and authority on the topic of burlesque. She is the founder, in 2003, and headmistress of The New York School of Burlesque. The school has taught disabled performers at DaDaFest in Liverpool, UK, and taught breast cancer survivors through its Pink Light Burlesque program.

From 2001 to 2010, Weldon produced the website G-Strings Forever, a collection of photographs and articles about stripping and burlesque. She maintained a LiveJournal account from 2004 to 2010 where she wrote extensively on burlesque, sex work, and women’s issues. Since 2007 Weldon has written the burlesque blog Burlesque Daily. From 2010 to 2011, Weldon answered burlesque questions on her Formspring account. She writes a burlesque etiquette column for Pin Curl Magazine.

Weldon supports and works for the rights of strippers and other sex workers. She has attended and spoken at academic conferences, including the 1999 Socialist Scholar’s Conference, the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting, the International Congress on Prostitution, and the United Nations Beijing Plus Five Conference, where she lobbied for the adoption of the term “sex work” and for a distinction between forced and voluntary sex work. Weldon has written articles on sex work and sex worker rights. Weldon also toured with the Sex Worker Arts Show, and co-produced W.O.(e).R.D., Women of experience Read Downtown, a performance reading of literary works by undomesticated women.

After moving to New York in 1997, Weldon took part in burlesque shows at The Blue Angel and Coney Island and was inspired by performances from Angie Pontani, Bambi the Mermaid and Remy Vicious. Weldon’s academic career includes a degree in Business Administration, with her graduate work in media ethics. During her internships, she worked writing summaries of House of Representatives activities and writing scripts for CNN.

Weldon was inspired by the sideshows and burlesque shows of Coney Island in the mid-1990s, and has moderated the Wild Women Panel, among others, as part of Coney Island’s annual Congress of Curious People. Weldon has produced shows for Coney Island’s Burlesque at the Beach series, including her annual Follies Fromage, a show based entirely on cheese, and the autobiographical God-Damned Women show. She is the coordinator and lead instructor of the Coney Island University Master Class in Burlesque.

Jo Weldon (born 1962), commonly known as Jo Boobs or Jo Boobs Weldon, is a performer, author, activist, and educator based in New York City. Weldon’s body of work centers around stripping and striptease. She established and runs The New York School of Burlesque and wrote The Burlesque Handbook. She is an advocate for sex-worker rights and freedom of sexual expression.