In comparing life experience, Whitney Marston Pierce has a pretty impressive resume. For starters, she was kidnapped in Egypt by camelback at age 11, held hostage in Ethiopia years later, and has been proposed to over a dozen times, engaged 5, and married thrice, but to only two men.
She’s been a college drop-out and graduate, model, magazine editor, casting director, cultural curator, publicist, and brand consultant. She’s studied Swahili in Zanzibar, backpacked through nine countries, lived overseas and stateside on both coasts and in between, and has performed at some of the world’s most massive festivals, venues, and events as a DJ and singer, thanks to the clout of her name, a little clever scheming and free-spirited swagger.
And while that all hardly covers the full biography of Whitney Marston Pierce, it is enough to make you feel a tad jealous and wonder what it is you’ve been doing with your life.
A California native raised between Detroit and Los Angeles, Pierce was led to dance music after falling in with the DFA Records crew. With them, she moved from L.A. to New York and started throwing her own wildly successful parties across the city. Spinning records was a new trick but she dove in with a fearless punk attitude and was quickly recruited by Nylon Magazine, TopShop, AllSaints, and others as the hot new DJ in town, falling in with the hipster, Lower East Side, and underground scenes. Leading to a decade of touring the world and playing with myriad notable acts, that you totally know.
Pierce’s creative output has oscillated between writing and production (music and otherwise.) Historically, her writing career has been tactical, telling brand stories, curating concepts, and creating ad campaigns. But now she’s writing what she knows best, her own story. Grimy lower Manhattan brought out the wildest in her, and there are stories to spare. She is currently co-writing Dirty Girls and StarF*cker with Gillian Telling and is working on a semi-autobiographical narrative non-fiction book called “How to Pretend to be Fancy,” with a companion edutainment show.
As for that resume of hers, and everything that led her here now, "As cliché as it sounds, it has just taken a fuck ton of work, silent and not-so-silent screams, love and love lost, learning and tears, incalculable drinks, and clawing at everything I wanted and deserved until I got it." she says. With a knowing smirk, she adds, "Plus I had a tendency to have affairs with famous people." And wouldn’t you like to know about it?