Warhol superstars were a clique of New York City personalities promoted by Andy Warhol during the 1960s and early 1970s. These personalities appeared in Warhol's artworks and accompanied him in his social life. They epitomized Warhol's famous dictum: "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." Warhol would simply film them, and declare them "superstars".

The first recognised superstar was Baby Jane Holzer, whom Warhol featured in many of his early film experiments. The superstars would help Warhol generate publicity while Warhol offered fame and attention in return. Warhol's philosophies of art and celebrity met in a way that imitated the Hollywood studio system at its height in the 1940s and 1950s.

Among the most well-known of Warhol's superstars was Edie Sedgwick. Sedgwick and Warhol became very close during 1965 but their relationship ended abruptly early in the next year. Warhol would continue to associate himself with people including Viva, Candy Darling, Ultra Violet, Nico and International Velvet.

Edith Minturn "Edie" Sedgwick (April 20, 1943 – November 16, 1971) was an American actress, socialite, fashion model and heiress. She is best known for being one of Andy Warhol's superstars. Sedgwick became known as "The Girl of the Year" in 1965 after starring in several of Warhol's short films in the 1960s. She was dubbed an "It Girl", while Vogue magazine also named her a "Youthquaker".

Edie Sedgwick was born in Santa Barbara, California, to Alice Delano de Forest (1908–1988) and Francis Minturn Sedgwick, (1904–1967, known as either "Duke" or "Fuzzy"), a philanthropist, rancher and sculptor. She was named after her father's aunt, Edith Minturn, famously painted with her husband, Isaac Newton Phelps-Stokes, by John Singer Sargent.

Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and sometimes controversial artist. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives. It is the largest museum in the United States of America dedicated to a single artist.

Andy Warhol's artwork ranged in many forms of media that include hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and music. He was a pioneer in computer-generated art using Amiga computers that were introduced in 1985, just before his death in 1987. He founded Interview Magazine and was the author of numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties. Andy Warhol is also notable as a gay man who lived openly as such before the gay liberation movement. His studio, The Factory, was a famous gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. He coined the widely used expression "15 minutes of fame". Many of his creations are very collectible and highly valuable. The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is US$100 million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises. The private transaction was reported in a 2009 article in The Economist, which described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market". Warhol's works include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold.

Joseph Angelo D'Allesandro (born December 31, 1948), better known as Joe Dallesandro, is an American actor, and Warhol superstar. Although he never became a mainstream film star, Dallesandro is generally considered to be the most famous male sex symbol of American underground films of the 20th century, as well as a sex symbol of gay subculture.

Dallesandro starred in Flesh as a teenage street hustler. Rolling Stone magazine in 1970 declared his second starring vehicle, Trash, the "Best Film of the Year", making him a star of the youth culture, sexual revolution and subcultural New York art collective of the 1970s.

A photograph of his crotch bulge encased in a tight-fitting pair of jeans is featured on the cover of the Rolling Stones 1971 album, Sticky Fingers. It was taken by Andy Warhol.

He was born in Pensacola, Florida. His father, Joseph Angelo D'Allesandro II, was an Italian-American sailor, and his mother was 16-year-old Thelma Testman. By the time Dallesandro was five, his mother was serving five years in a Federal Penitentiary for interstate auto theft. His parents divorced soon afterward. Dallesandro and his brother, Bobby, were taken to New York with their father, who worked as an electrical engineer. Both boys were eventually placed into the Angel Guardian Home in Harlem, prior to being fostered by a couple in Brooklyn. The senior Dallesandro would visit them about once a month at their foster parents' home.

Holly Woodlawn (born October 26, 1946) is a Puerto Rican-born transgendered actress and former Warhol superstar, who appeared in his movies Trash (1970) and Women in Revolt (1972).

Born Haroldo Santiago Franceschi Rodriguez Danhakl in Juana Díaz, Puerto Rico, Woodlawn adopted the name Holly from the heroine of Breakfast at Tiffany's, and in 1969 added the surname from a sign she saw on an episode of I Love Lucy. After changing her name she began to tell people she was the heiress to Woodlawn Cemetery.

Woodlawn grew up in Miami Beach and in 1962 left, heading north. She recollects that "I hocked some jewellery and ... made it all the way to Georgia, where the money ran out and ... had to hitchhike the rest of the way" to New York.

Woodlawn met Andy Warhol at the Factory, at a screening of Flesh. Through him she met Jackie Curtis, who cast Woodlawn in her play Heaven Grand in Amber Orbit in the autumn of 1969. In October she was given a bit role in Trash, but so impressed director Paul Morrissey that she was given a much larger role. In 1970 she received word from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that George Cukor, supported by others, was petitioning the Academy to nominate her for best actress for her work in Trash^{[citation needed]}, however, nothing came of this campaign.