Born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania outside Pittsburgh in 1946, Leslie Labowitz Starus relocated to California with her family and has resided in Los Angeles since 1958. She did her first early feminist performances while attending Otis Art Institute  in Los Angeles and received her MFA in 1972.  

After graduating, that same year Labowitz Starus was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to travel to Germany to attend the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf where Joseph Beuys was a mentor. At this time, Labowitz Starus also co-founded a women’s video group with artist Ulrike Rosenbach. When she lived in Europe, she also taught performance at Bonn University 1973-75 and art at the University of Maryland campuses in Rota, Spain 1975-76 and Nueremberg, Germany 1976-77.

After Labowitz returned to the United States in 1977, she started her collaborations with Suzanne Lacy. During this time, they collaborated on Three Weeks in May (1977) and other public events on violence against women including In Mourning and In Rage (1977) an internationally known performance during the serial rape and murders of 11 women in Los Angeles by Hillside Strangler. Labowitz Starus and Lacy then formed Ariadne: A Social Art Network (1977-1982) an umbrella for public performances on violence against women that included people in media, politics and the art community who participated in these large scale events.  www.againstviolence.art

Labowitz Starus initiated SPROUTIME (1980 -2024) her art/life practice and eco-feminist project that spans four decades. Integrating personal and global survival into performances and installations, she started Sproutime by growing organic sprouts and greens, creating a with a micro-urban farm in her yard in Venice, California. This was followed by a series of ecologically motivated performances and installations produced in galleries across the United States. 

As an outgrowth of these art installations, Labowitz Starus started her business enterprise (also called Sproutime) in 1980.  Ultimately, she built a green art/life business growing and distributing organic food throughout the US until 2011 and maintains her sprout stand in the Santa Monica Farmers Market as her ongoing legacy. The nurturing and healing aspects of SPROUTIME counteracts Labowitz Starus’s  experience growing up with intergenerational trauma as a child of a holocaust survivor.  Today, she continues to mine her artistic and family archives, integrating the personal and the political in her ongoing environmental social practice.