Picturephoto by Jeanne Vienne
ADELE BERTEI BIOGRAPHY
(homepage photo by Kiki Smith, 1977)

Adele Bertei is an author, director, performer, and musician, and resides in Los Angeles, CA. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, daughter of an Italian immigrant and a ballroom dance instructor. Her career in music began as singer/guitarist in a rock band called Peter and the Wolves, performing at longshoremen and biker bars in Cleveland. The premature death of bandmate Peter Laughner of Pere Ubu resulted in Bertei's move to New York in 1977, where she quickly became a pivotal figure in a counter-cultural movement of art, film, music, and literature. She was an original member of the Contortions, produced by Brian Eno on the seminal No New York record. Reading prose and poetry, she opened for writers such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Kathy Acker among many others. Bertei acted in several underground films, including a lead role in Born In Flames by Lizzie Borden, films by Scott & Beth B., and films by Irish filmmaker Vivienne Dick. She appears in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the documentary about Nan Goldin. MoMA acquired films of Bertei reading her poem The Ragazzi Manifesto in 1978, and the feature The Offenders, directed by Scott and Beth B., in which Bertei plays the lead. She’s been the subject of artists and photographers Kiki Smith, Richard Prince, Nan Goldin, Zoe Leonard, Julia Gorton, Marcia Resnick, Laura Levine, Beate Nilsen and David La Chappelle.

Bertei has toured the world with her band, the Bloods – America’s first openly queer all-girl band – and as backing singer with Tears for Fears and Sophie B. Hawkins. She has performed and recorded as a backing vocalist for artists such as Tears for Fears, Thomas Dolby, Culture Club, Whitney Houston, Sandra Bernhard, and Matthew Sweet among others, and has released records as a solo artist with both the Geffen and Chrysalis labels. International dance and pop hits include “Build Me a Bridge”, “Hyperactive!” with Thomas Dolby and Jellybean's “Just a Mirage”. Bertei has written songs for artists as diverse as Peter Laughner, Thomas Dolby, Scritti Politti, Sheena Easton, Arthur Baker, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Matthew Sweet, Lydia Lunch, the Pointer Sisters,  Jellybean Benitez, and the Anubian Lights. She continues to perform and release original music occasionally, at Club Salo in Paris, MoMA’s Club 57 exhibition, and Florence’s Queer Festival where she screened her surrealist short political satire film, The Littlest Trampette.  

After relocating to Los Angeles, Bertei worked as a behind-the-scenes director and ghostwriter, contributing ideas to hundreds of successful advertising campaigns. Her stories have appeared in the now defunct New York Rocker, the  Caribbean magazine 6 Carlos, Vibe magazine and the Huffington Post. Her stories and essays have been included in compilations published by Semiotext(e) The New Fuck You; Adventures in Lesbian Reading (edited by Eileen Myles) and It’s So You edited by Michelle Tea for Seal Press, as well as Evelyn McDonnell’s Women Who Rock, published by Black Dog & Leventhal. She's granted two residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts to work on her memoir manuscript, Twist. She studied with Gordon Lish in NYC at his infamous summer writing workshop in 2010, and was awarded the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation fellowship at Tomales Bay in conjunction with UC Davis for Dorothy Allison’s writing workshop.

Bertei has created and facilitated songwriting workshops for homeless youth at My Friend’s Place in Hollywood, and as a member of Wayne Kramer’s Jail Guitar Doors, teaching songwriting to the incarcerated at the Twin Towers facility in downtown LA, and at Century Women’s Regional Center at Lynwood, the largest women’s jail in the nation. She created a collective called WREN, Women’s Re-Entry Network to help alleviate the challenges of women being released from jails and prisons. WREN’S first action was a series of release-care packages for women transitioning from jails into housing and support at Susan Burton’s A New Way of Life re-entry project.

As author, her first book Peter and the Wolves is a short memoir of her rock and roll education via legendary Cleveland musician Peter Laughner, released by Smog Veil Records in November, 2020. Titles include Why Labelle Matters published by the University of Texas Press in March, 2021. Twist: Tales of a Queer Girlhood published by ZE Books in 2023, and Universal Mother (Sinéad O'Connor) released by Bloomsbury in 2025. Her next book, No New York:
A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene will be released by Faber & Faber in early 2026. 

email contact for Adele Bertei
1978 dancing with Janet Stein at Nan Goldin's loft,
being filmed by Vivienne Dick.  Nan in the BG snapping away.