Sabine Tautou, a New York–based artist, dominatrix and fetish professional, draws on more than thirteen years of experience to explore power, labour, consent and spectatorship through fetish, film and public performance.
Tautou entered sex work at eighteen, while still a college freshman. Her path was not straightforward: after initially leaving college, she later returned to earn a degree in Paralegal Studies and spent several years balancing work in the legal field with her growing career as a fetish professional. Eventually, she left the office behind to focus fully on professional domination and performance art. The two worlds may appear radically opposed, yet both are structured by rules, negotiation, authority and carefully defined roles.
In Tautou’s work, BDSM becomes more than subject matter. It functions as a visual language through which familiar hierarchies can be exposed, exaggerated and rearranged. By relocating acts normally associated with private fetish spaces into films, city streets and ordinary environments, she unsettles the boundary between intimacy and spectacle—and asks who is truly performing, who is watching and where power actually resides.
That tension became particularly visible during a public performance in Nolita, where Tautou mummified a participant to a street pole and poured milk over him during a New York heat wave. The intervention quickly went viral, attracting more than a million combined views and transforming an ephemeral street action into an endlessly circulated digital image. Her short films Ashtray Wife, Human Wastebasket and Coffee Break, created with filmmaker Cameron Postforoosh, similarly turn service, objectification and submission into darkly composed visual rituals.
As she expands her practice into galleries, museums, film and editorial spaces, Tautou is entering an art world that has long borrowed the imagery of sex work while often excluding sex workers from its institutions. Her work confronts that contradiction directly, insisting that domination can be both profession and performance, fetish and formal language, intimate exchange and serious artistic inquiry.
Hi Sabine! It’s a pleasure to sit down with you! First question that I always ask. How does a regular day look like for you in Brooklyn?
Sabine: I travel a lot for work, but when I’m not traveling and in Brooklyn, I have no structure or routine whatsoever, which feels like a luxury I’ve worked really hard to have. If I’m seeing clients, I might spend the day at an incall location. If I’m not seeing clients, I always walk around outside for 4-8 hours a day, and may meet up with friends, maybe plan concepts for a video or a public performance, or anything really. The only exception is when it rains, I really don’t like the rain, so if it rains I’ll usually stay inside all day and feel incredibly emotionally and mentally lethargic.
I’m curious, growing up, what kind of kid were you? What did you enjoy doing, and how did you spend your time?
Sabine: I have a horrible memory, so I don’t remember much of anything from my childhood. One thing I do remember very distinctly is the feeling of being intensely present, alive, and so vibrant. It’s a level of energy and internal power that I’ve never come close to experiencing again in adulthood. I think I’ve spent a lot of my adult life chasing that feeling and doing things that I hope might bring me closer to it again.
Ok Sabine, let’s jump right into it! You’ve worked in the fetish industry for more than thirteen years, but only began publicly documenting your artistic practice in 2026. Why did this feel like the right moment to become publicly visible as an artist?
Sabine: Well for most of my adult life, I was incredibly private and secretive about my sex work, without realizing just how disabling and debilitating it was to me to live in secret like that. It was only about a year ago that I even started telling people outside of my absolute closest friends what I did for work.
I think that transformation and the permission I gave myself to live a part of my life that I’d kept mostly hidden for almost twelve years more openly, gave me a sense of freedom that I hadn’t experienced before. There was more creative energy, more levity, and a deeper feeling of being seen and understood. I then had the space to actively pursue the creative concepts I’d been developing for years and to finally begin documenting them publicly through film and performance.
Do you remember the moment when you first realized that something taking place within a BDSM session could also be understood as conceptual or performance art?
Sabine: Very early on, I was especially drawn to the textile elements I incorporated into sessions, particularly rope and saran wrap. I don’t think I initially had the language to describe why I was so drawn to those materials, but I instinctively viewed them in an artistic way. I was fascinated by how using them on a person, especially using saran wrap to mummify someone, would so dramatically transform my perception of them, making them feel less recognizably human and more like an object of visual study.
What does BDSM allow you to communicate that more conventional forms of performance art cannot?
Sabine: I don’t know that BDSM allows me to communicate something that other forms of performance art can’t. I think every medium offers different possibilities. The work I make comes directly from the life I’ve lived. I’ve spent the last thirteen years as a sex worker, primarily focused on domination and fetish work, so that’s the lens through which my ideas developed. I’m not trying to fit my work into BDSM, it’s simply where my artistic experience and ideas exist.
Is Sabine Tautou a persona you inhabit, an extension of yourself, a form of protection, or an artistic medium in her own right?
Sabine: Sabine Tautou is me, and I am her. I don’t experience ‘Sabine’ as a persona that I step into or out of. My work and my art are inseparable from my life, and Sabine is inseparable from both. She’s my work, my art, and the lens through which I experience and express much of my life.
Dominance is often misunderstood as the simple possession of power. Do you experience domination more as control, responsibility, attentiveness, or something else entirely?
Sabine: To me the purpose of dominance has never been control for its own sake. I cultivate and use my own dominance as a way of giving someone permission to experience the submissive parts of themselves that they’re craving but may not be able to access in their everyday lives. My role isn’t simply to direct or control someone, it’s to create an environment where they feel safe enough to fully inhabit that part of themselves.
BDSM depends upon negotiated consent, boundaries and trust. What could society more broadly learn from the way those things are articulated within BDSM?
Sabine: Probably the intentionality of it all. BDSM asks people to consciously create the experience they want rather than passively falling into one. I think that’s a valuable mindset.
How much of your authority as a dominatrix comes from knowing when not to exercise power?
Sabine: There are many different styles of domination, and I’m not a hard domme. My approach is more playful and unpredictable. I like to put people at ease before challenging them because I find they’re more likely to reach the headspace they’re seeking. Because of that, my dominance can sometimes look like restraint rather than overt power. But I feel powerful the entire time. I don’t measure dominance by how forcefully it’s expressed, but by how intentionally it’s used.
Consent is usually discussed as something that precedes an encounter. In your experience, is it actually something that must be continually created and renegotiated?
Sabine: I think it’s important to be attentive to how someone is responding throughout an experience. You have to be willing to adjust the experience as needed, particularly when someone is trying something for the first time.
Humiliation can be consensual within BDSM, but it also exists throughout society in non-consensual forms. Can consensual humiliation expose or even dismantle social hierarchies, or does it inevitably risk reproducing them?
Sabine: I do think consensual humiliation can expose, and sometimes dismantle, traditional gender hierarchies. One of the ways I’m interested in doing that is through role reversal. In one of my short films, Ashtray Wife, I dressed a male subject in nothing but a maid’s apron and heels. His arms were bound, and he used a feather duster to sweep up my cigarette ash before I used him as an ashtray and ashed directly into his mouth, a deliberately humiliating act. He was inhabiting the role of a 1950s housewife while I occupied the role of the husband. By reversing familiar gender dynamics, my hope is that people who view it question why certain expectations feel so ordinary in one direction but so shocking in the other.
Are you interested in reversing existing power structures, or in showing how willingly people participate in them?
Sabine: Both, depending on the work. Sometimes reversing a power structure is the most effective way to expose it. What interests me is making those dynamics impossible to ignore.
Starting in the sex working business at 18, can you tell me about how you first got introduced to the business?
Sabine: I was introduced to sex work when I was 18. To protect her identity, I’ll call her M. She was a girl I had an intense crush on during my freshman year of college. One day she came into my dorm room and told me about a website she’d joined where she was meeting men and having sex for money, and told me to try it too. So, of course, I did. To give you an idea of how captivated I was by her, she had a large deer tattooed across her back. A couple of years after we’d lost contact, I got a deer tattooed on my chest inspired by hers, so she clearly had a huge influence on me.
You spent several years working simultaneously as a paralegal and a sex worker. Did those two professional identities ever feel contradictory, or did they reveal similar things about power and human behavior?
Sabine: No. I hated working as a paralegal, and I wasn’t very good at it. I was completely exhausted trying to balance it with sex work, so I don’t think I gained any deep insights from the legal field.
Looking back at the 13 years, what are some of your best and worst memories?
Sabine: The best memories are honestly just the life that this work has given me. Financially, it’s allowed me to build a life that I would not have come anywhere close to having otherwise. Money isn’t everything, though. I genuinely love what I do. It’s given me freedom, incredible experiences, and the ability to build a life on my own terms.
The worst part was hiding it. For most of my adult life, almost nobody knew what I did except the people closest to me. I didn’t realize until I started being open about my work just how debilitating that secrecy had been for me mentally. Looking back, that’s the one thing I would absolutely do differently.
Why did you decide to leave the legal profession? What was going through your mind at that time?
Sabine: Leaving the legal world so I could fully focus on my other career in sex work was a terrifying decision to make. A traditional job comes with company provided health insurance, a 401(k), and a level of security that’s predictable etc. Choosing to leave that behind and fully commit to my own business meant betting and relying solely on myself, and trusting that I could build the life I wanted without that safety net. It wasn’t a decision I made overnight. It was something I thought about for a long time, and eventually I found the courage to make that decision and I am so happy I did.
What happens to a private power dynamic when it’s relocated into an ordinary public setting?
Sabine: I think relocating it into public strips away the assumption that it’s just about BDSM. Instead, it invites people to examine ideas about power, gender, labor, spectatorship, and the roles we perform in everyday life.
Ritual plays an important role in your work, yet you describe yourself as an atheist. What does ritual mean when it is separated from religious belief?
Sabine: I don’t think someone needs to be religious to have a relationship with or an understanding of ritual. I think anyone can create ritualistic experiences if they’re deliberate in their actions.
What would a truly uncompromized Sabine Tautou museum performance look like if there were no institutional restrictions?
Sabine: The ideas themselves wouldn’t change. They’d just be presented in their fullest form instead of being diluted by what’s permitted online or in public.
So with everything we just talked about, what are you hoping to convey through your work?
Sabine: I use BDSM as a framework to examine familiar gender roles and power structures. By exaggerating or reversing them, I’m interested in seeing what suddenly becomes visible.
Ok Sabine, now to something totally different. In a parallel universe who would you be? and what would you be doing?
Sabine: I hope what I’m doing now, I like who I am. But hopefully married to my third husband who is a generationally wealthy bi man.
Outside of everything you’re doing now, what’s something you’re obsessed with right now, maybe a hobby, a show, or even a food, that keeps you grounded or inspired?
Sabine: My creative and beautiful friends and SW peers. They amaze me, I am enamored with them, and I appreciate the mutual support and care given. Also recently I’ve been cutting lamb skins into strips and sewing the ends together and then doing a plain weave pattern with them. I’m working on a large 6 foot by 3 foot piece now that I’ll frame when I’m finished.
What qualities do you find most important in the people you choose to spend time with?
Sabine: Calmness, understanding, intentionality.
Anybody you look up to?
Sabine: Women.
What motivates you?
Sabine: This is going to sound incredibly self-centered, but I’m mostly motivated by the pursuit of my own happiness. I don’t naturally or consistently feel happy or very good, so I’m constantly chasing whatever I think might get me closer to feeling that way.
How would you describe a perfect day?
Sabine: I would wake up feeling good, that’s huge in itself, then I get to do something I enjoy all day long. I most enjoy walking, so probably like walking around in a city I love from 9 AM til midnight.
Alright Sabine, I always ask these two questions at the end of an interview. The first is. What’s your favorite movie(s) and why?
Sabine: Léon. It is just so so sexy. I like everything about it.
The second is. What song(s) are you currently listening to the most right now?
Sabine: If It Makes You Happy by Sheryl Crow. I have absolutely no relationship with Sheryl Crow beyond this one song, but I play it almost every day of my life. It makes me feel GREAT.