Lust was born Erika Hallqvist in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1977. She harboured a passion for film and theatre.

She went to Lund University, where she studied Political Sciences. While there, she came across Linda Williams' 1989 book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", which later came to strongly influence her filmmaking. She also cites Jean Jacques Annaud's The Lover as a source of inspiration. She graduated with a BA in 1999, with a specialization in human rights and feminism. She moved to Barcelona in 2000, where she worked in production houses and took night courses in filmmaking.

Lust shot her first film, the explicit short The Good Girl, in 2004. It was released for free on the internet and downloaded over 2 million times in the first month. The film was shown at the Barcelona International Erotic Film Festival the next year and won her a Ninfa Award.

In 2005, after this initial success, she founded her video production company Lust Films. The company has produced erotic short films and compilations steadily from then on. Five Hot Stories For Her, an anthology of five vignettes including The Good Girl, won several international awards in 2007. Since then she has been a regular on the adult cinema festival circuit.

She runs an online store offering her books and films, as well as sex toys and other erotic wares. Her company Lust Productions now has 12 employees. She also maintains a blog. She has written several books on eroticism and sexuality. Her book Good Porn was published in 2009 by Seal Press. In December 2014, Lust hosted a TED-talk at TEDxVienna. In the talk, entitled "It's Time For Porn To Change", Lust urges people to question the modern state of porn, its messages and role as a sexual educator. The TED talk launched the start of her campaign #changeporn, an online campaign intended to challenge and change the porn norm. The talk has been watched nearly 700,000 times on YouTube.

In 2010, Lust opened an online erotic cinema called Lust Cinema, exhibiting her own films and those of other authors of the new wave of explicit films.

Her film Cabaret Desire won her the Feminist Porn Award for Movie of the Year in 2012. It also won the Cinekink Audience Choice Award for Best Narrative Feature. The first two compilations of her XConfessions series have won her the Feminist Porn Awards for Hottest Straight Vignette in 2014 and 2015 respectively. In 2015, A theatrical cut of XConfessions was screened at Chicago International Film Festival and at Raindance Film Festival in London. Following that, in 2016, Lust held two sold out screenings of the XConfessions Theatrical Cut at Babylon in Berlin in February and won Best Narrative Short at the Cinekink Awards for short film An Appointment with My Master.

Lust started the first crowdsourced project in the history of adult cinema in 2013, calling it XConfessions. It has become her main source of work in recent years.

Lust is currently producing short pornographic films based on crowd-sourced stories. Viewers can leave anonymous confessions on the project's website. Each month, Lust handpicks two stories and turn them into cinematic short films. She has already published eleven volumes of XConfessions shorts. XConfessions has been presented at the Berlin Porn Festival 2014. In 2015, a theatrical cut of XConfessions was screened along with a talk by Lust at the Raindance Film Festival in London and at the Chicago International Film Festival. In 2016 Lust held two sold out screenings of the XConfessions Theatrical Cut at Babylon in Berlin in February and won Best Narrative Short at the Cinekink Awards New York for BDSM short film An Appointment with My Master.