Asia Carrera (born Jessica Andrea Steinhauser on August 6, 1973 in New York City) is a former adult film star.
Classical piano background, education
Asia has stated that she was born in New Jersey to a German mother and Japanese father. She studied piano as a child, and she had performed at Carnegie Hall twice before the age of 15. When she was 16, she ran away from home because she felt her parents put too much pressure on her to succeed academically. She claims to have had her IQ tested at 155 and she was a salutatorian of Stuyvesant High School.[citation needed]
She won an academic scholarship to Rutgers University, and she is a member of Mensa [1], which would make her one of two claimants to have worked as an adult actress. The other Mensa claimant is Vicca.
Adult film career
Asia worked during the early 90's as a dancer at several go-go bars in her home state of New Jersey.
After doing at least one photoshoot for an adult magazine back East, she put together a demo porn tape in 1993. At the end of that year she relocated to California to break into the pornography business and she announced her retirement at the end of 2003. She is sometimes credited as Asia or Jessica Bennett.
Carrera has also been involved in writing, producing, and directing movies, as well as doing all her own make-up and hair-styling, and doing much of the hair and make-up for other actresses in the same movies.
As is common practice among adult film actresses, the name "Asia Carrera" is a pseudonym. According to interviews, she chose the stage name surname from actress Tia Carrere, intentionally misspelling it for legal reasons.
After her contract with Vivid expired in the mid '90s, Asia had her right labia minora pierced and has henceforth had a variety of 1/2" gold rings affixed there ever since. At this time she also had her first breast enlargement, going from a medium B to at least a full C cup. She has had at least one subsequent breast surgery and is now a D cup or larger.
Asia has performed only a few anal sex scenes, again waiting for her contract with Vivid to expire to do her first scene in the movie "A Is For Asia". While anal sex pays better, Asia stated that, while she found it enjoyable, it wasn't something she did in her personal life a great deal and had no interest in becoming an "anal queen" in the industry.
Other interests
Describing herself as "the nerd of porn", Carrera has an active presence on the Internet. She proudly proclaims that she created her own Web site in the late 1990s, including writing the code and editing the pictures.
She is an avid player of Unreal Tournament and she has designed her own game skins, and was featured in the show Players on the G4 games cable channel, where she revealed that her screen name is "Megabitchgoddess." Asia hosted her own Unreal Tournament server that featured custom maps designed by fans that frequented her chatroom that she has hosted on her site since 1997. She is also a Corvette aficionado but traded hers in after starting a family.
Personal life
In 1995, Carrera married adult film director Bud Lee. They divorced in 2003 after a long separation. She married nutritionist and author Don Lemmon on December 19, 2003. The couple moved to St. George, Utah where Carrera gave birth to her first daughter, Catalina, on March 4, 2005. While she was almost 8 months pregnant with their second baby, Lemmon was killed in a car accident near Las Vegas on June 10, 2006. Carrera has expressed concerns about her livelihood and has begun to solicit donations on her personal webpage [2][3].
Their son, who was born on July 31st 2006, was initially to be named Devin but she decided, after Lemmon's death, to name him Donald Edward Lemmon III. [4] She gave birth to her son at home alone, as the birth was 11 days early and the midwife was en route. Currently they are all doing well.
Carrera is outspoken about her disapproval of becoming involved with illegal drugs, and the adverse effects she has seen it take on personal lives and careers of her colleagues.
She is an atheist and also known to be interested in human death, as a natural phenomenon. She has mentioned reading several books about it and views death to be an awful end to human existence.
