Sharon Mitchell
Career
Mitchell trained with the Martha Graham Dance Company before entering adult film, and won AVN Best Actress at the very first AVN Awards in 1984. After surviving a violent assault in 1996 she moved into addiction counselling, earning an MA and PhD from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, and in 1998 founded the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation (AIM), which tested over 1,000 performers a month for STIs until a 2011 data breach forced its closure.
Signature: She is the reason the industry had an internal STI-testing infrastructure at all for over a decade, built after her own recovery from addiction and a near-fatal assault.
Index score — The Pornstar Ranked Performer Index v3.0
Scores are normalised within a single ranking's field, so this breakdown is Sharon Mitchell's placement inside Female Pornstars Who Built the Industry, Ranked by Impact — the largest field she appears in. Her rank on each of the other 3 rankings below was computed against that ranking's own field and is not the same measurement.
Full award record4 entries
- 1984AVN — Best Actress
- 1988XRCO — Hall of Fame
- 1993Free Speech Coalition — Lifetime Achievement
- —AVN — Hall of Fame
Beyond performing
- Founder, Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation (AIM), 1998–2011
- Certified addiction counsellor
- PhD, Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality
Mainstream credits
- Tootsie (1982, minor role)
- The Deer Hunter (1978, minor role)
- Subject of the 1986 documentary Kamikaze Hearts
Official links
No official accounts confirmed. We only list handles we have verified on an authoritative page — a guessed handle in this industry usually belongs to an impersonator.
Appears in
Also ranked on
Ranked alongside
Sources and verification3 sources
- Birth year reported as either 1957 or 1958
- AVN Hall of Fame induction year not documented
- Exact end date of on-screen performing not documented
