Paula Joanne Sterbenz Bio
Paula Joanne Sterbenz is an American Glamour and nude model. She was born on August 30, 1974, in San Francisco, California, and has also been credited as Paula Sterbenz. She appeared as a Playboy Muse in December 1999 at 25. Her appearance came during Playboy's 1990s print era, a period increasingly shaped by entertainment and celebrity culture.
Sterbenz has enhanced breasts, blue eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 35-24-36.
Paula Joanne Sterbenz came to Playboy from Hawaii with an ambition that had been quietly developing for years. She had grown up knowing the magazine through her father’s Playboy collection, and somewhere along the way an idea took hold: one day, she wanted to be one of the women in those pages herself.
That opportunity finally arrived in 1999, when Sterbenz posed exclusively for Playboy for the first time as a Sexy Girl Next Door. With French and Hawaiian ancestry, Paula brought an island-girl warmth to a feature built around exactly what its name promised — discovering beautiful women outside Playboy’s traditional Playmate lineup and giving them their own moment in front of the camera.
For Paula, however, the shoot wasn't simply a mischievous one-time adventure. She had bigger Playboy ambitions. “I have high hopes for becoming part of your team,” she told the magazine, making it clear that she would happily turn her first pictorial into the beginning of something more.
That eagerness gave Sterbenz’s December 1999 Muse appearance much of its charm. This was Playboy at the end of the millennium, when the Girl Next Door fantasy still meant finding someone who seemed as though she might genuinely have stepped out of everyday life and unexpectedly into a pictorial. Paula fit the idea beautifully: new to Playboy, excited to be there and already wondering where the Bunny might take her next.
Her documented Playboy story may be brief, but it captures a lovely full-circle moment. Paula first discovered the magazine through a collection at home, imagined herself becoming part of that world and eventually found herself posing for Playboy for the first time. By December 1999, she wasn't looking through those pages anymore — Paula Joanne Sterbenz had finally become one of the women inside them.
