We report here a facile synthesis of high performance electro-active polymer actuator based on a sulfonated polyimide with well-defined silver electrodes via self-metallization. The proposed method greatly reduces fabrication time and cost, and obviates a cation exchange process required in the fabrication of ionic polymer-metal composite actuators. Also, the self-metallized silver electrodes exhibit outstanding metal-polymer adhesion with high conductivity, resulting in substantially larger tip displacements compared with Nafion-based actuators.