Lisa Crystal Carver

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Lisa Crystal Carver (born November 9, 1968) is an American writer, performance artist, and musician who sometimes goes by the name Lisa Suckdog. She is best known for her zine Rollerderby and for bringing artists like Vaginal Davis, Dame Darcy, Cindy Dall, Boyd Rice, and Jean-Louis Costes to a wider audience. A collection of her Rollerderby articles was published as Rollerderby: The Book.

Carver started touring with the performance art band Psycodrama at age 18 and began sex work, themes that repeatedly appear in her writing. She began touring with Costes a year later and, when he was in France, also toured on her own. She traveled six times across the United States and Europe, the last time in 1998. Her performances, described as noise music soap operas, often included audience participation, dancing, and mock-rape scenes.

Her book Dancing Queen: a Lusty Look at the American Dream looks at relics of pop culture such as Lawrence Welk, roller rinks, and Olivia Newton-John. In 2005 Soft Skull Press published Drugs Are Nice, which covers her early life and her relationships with Costes, Boyd Rice (with whom she has a son), and Bill Callahan of Smog.

Carver has written for various magazines, including Hate and Nerve, and kept a fictionalized journal about her sex life for Nerve. That journal was later published as The Lisa Diaries: Four Years in the Sex Life of Lisa Carver and Company.

In 2012 she published Reaching Out with No Hands: Reconsidering Yoko Ono, a study of Ono’s artistic career. By 2015 she contributed pieces to The Recoup. Her short story collection The Jaywalker, illustrated by Dame Darcy, appeared around 2016, and Carver, Darcy, Maddie Kuzak, and Genevieve Kuzak toured internationally to promote it—a show reminiscent of the early 1990s Suckdog era. In 2017 she self-published Suckdog: A Ruckus, a book with over 80 photos and drawings looking back at her wild onstage past.

In 2023 she published an essay in The Paris Review comparing French and American culture and describing her relationship with her husband Bruno. In her personal life, Carver has been married four times and divorced three. She lived in Montmorency, France from 2021 to 2025 and currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.