Local actress strives to be more than just a pretty face

NORTH ADAMS – Bella Vendetta is a renaissance woman.

A professional cook, nationally published journalist and successful clothing designer, Ms. Vendetta has a resume that would impress anyone. She also happens to be an  award-winning and nominated adult actress.

“I love it, my life is awesome,” she said in an interview with The Beacon. “I will be the last to ever complain about my life.”

A resident of North Adams, she grew up in Berkshire County and attended school in Pittsfield and Lenox. Although she has traveled and lived all around the country, she said she feels most at home in The Berkshires and keeps coming back.

“I’ve never felt afraid in Berkshire County,” said Ms. Vendetta, who expressed great love for the area throughout her interview.

She attended the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale for about nine months for video production. However, finding that she’d learned much of what they were teaching when she interned at CTSB in Lee when she was in high school, she decided not to continue her education there.

Before beginning her career in the adult industry, she made a living as a cook. Her father is a noted chef who has worked in many prominent restaurants in Berkshire County and owned his own restaurant several times.

“I kind of just was born into it,” said Ms. Vendetta, who started working in restaurants around the time she could walk and bus a table. “I started cooking and thinking about it seriously as a career when I was still in high school.”

Around the time she was 23, however, she realized cooking professionally was not the path she wanted to be on, despite making good money at it.

“It’s just not what I wanted to do for a job,” said Ms. Vendetta, who nevertheless has done stints working as a cook a number of times since.

Ms. Vendetta has done non-adult modeling since around the time she was 14 years old, as well as setting up photo shoots, writing zines and designing clothes. One of the reasons why she gave up cooking as a career was it was interfering with her ability to pursue her creative endeavors.

“Cooking was cutting into my creative time,” she said. “When you cook you’re tired all the time, you’re working a 14-hour day, you’re on your feet, you’re exhausted, you don’t have time to do things like that.”

She then began modeling as a career, doing a lot of fashion modeling and clothing design.

Ms. Vendetta still makes clothes, both for the general public and the adult industry. At one point she stopped doing adult modeling to focus entirely on making clothing for adult shoots.

“I’ve always felt like, I couldn’t do it all, but really, you can, and I am,” she said, adding everything is about balance. “I still make clothes, I still model, I still cook, I still do all the things; I just do them in moderation.”

She did her first adult modeling shoot when she was 18.

“I did not think of it as a career path in any way,” said Ms. Vendetta, who did soft core and fetish photo shoots for many years after, although this wasn’t a primary source of income for a while.

She started her own website, Bellavendetta.com, in 2004, and began doing more fetish work and having sex on camera.

In terms of her personal safety, Ms. Vendetta doesn’t publicize her address or legal name.

“I think it’s just a matter of being smart about it,” she said.

She also thinks enough people in The Berkshires are educated enough about her and her line of work to know that she is a responsible member of the community.

“I have no intention of harming the community in any way,” she said. “So hopefully people get it and can kind of leave me alone and have respect.”

Educating people about sexuality and sex work is another part of her life, and she has spoken at numerous colleges, including Rutgers University, about gender and sexuality.

“I hope to come to Berkshire County [to speak at a college],” said Ms.Vendetta, who has been in contact with faculty at Williams College about speaking there next year.

Her immediate family is aware of of her adult industry work and are supportive of her, although some members of her extended family are not.

“It’s unfortunate, but people hear porn and they freak out,” she said.

She is also thankful to her network of friends, both in and outside of the adult industry.

“Without my friends in general I would be nowhere,” she said.

She also works as a professional journalist, a career that began when she was disappointed in the quality of articles in Burning Angel magazine.

“Their interviews kind of sucked…I read them and said, ‘I wish you guys would let me do interviews for you,’” she said.

She now writes about two articles a month, and in addition to Burning Angel, her articles appear in such publications as Prick magazine, Tattoos for Women magazine and Tattoos for Men magazine (all three of which are tattoo magazines).

Her journalistic work often involves interviewing bands, and she has done profiles of such nationally recognized acts as Municipal Waste, Behemoth and Cannibal Corpse, something she particularly enjoys as a longtime fan of heavy metal music.

“It’s where I sort of started,” said Ms. Vendetta on journalism, noting she began writing zines when she was 12 years old. “It came full circle.”

If she could change anything about the adult industry, she said she would like to see it become unionized.

“I would first of all want it to be unionized and have fair wages and [a] fair work environment for every performer in the industry,” she said.

Posted by Bera B. Dunau on November 1, 2012. Filed under Arts and Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry