Meet Jia Lissa: 'Citizen of the World'

A version of this feature appeared in the April issue of AVN magazine. Click here for the digital edition. LOS ANGELES—Jia Lissa wears a vibrator necklace, plays the ukulele, wrote a song called “I Like to Masturbate” and celebrated her birthday with a porno cake. “Oh my god, I celebrate it in Moscow,” Lissa, the Russian-born redhead and 2020 AVN Award-winner, recalls of her special day on September 1st. “I had a huge celebrating and I ordered myself a cake with a big chocolate dick and I write ‘Born for Porn.’  “Oh my gosh it was so fun. All of my friends were not from porn industry. They went crazy. … And then I sucked this chocolate dick.” The free-spirited, 23-year-old performer—who earned the nickname “Jiayonce” for her singing talents—won her first AVN trophy in January for Best Foreign-Shot Group Sex Scene, making national news in her native country and giving her family a sense of pride. Lissa tasted AVN gold for her performance with Jason Luv and Ella Hughes in “Double Dare” for Blacked Raw. “It is my first one but not my last one I hope,” Lissa tells AVN. “I felt happy and you know my mom, she’s really proud. She cried. She called me with my sister and they were crying and they said, ‘Oh my god, we are so proud of you.’  “My mom said that I’m kind of like a leader of sexual revolution for not only Russian, but like European girls—maybe some way. I don’t know…that’s what she said. That’s what she think.” Lissa, who at press time in February had about 50 performing credits since her debut in 2017, says she never entertained the thought of receiving honors for what she’s doing. “I’m not doing it to win awards. But you know what I say, it’s not a competition. It’s not about winning, it’s about having fun. And I say sex is not a competition but I got an award for it,” Lissa says with a laugh. “I have such loyal fans. This is the best award I can get.”  She calls the triumphant scene with fellow redhead Ella Hughes and Luv “amazing.” “It was so fun. She’s so fun to shoot with and I knew it was going to be bomb. I said redheads do it better,” Lissa continues. “And I love Jason Luv. My god, he’s so good. I shot with him before and we became good friends—if you know what I mean.” She says it was Chef, one of the creators of Disciples of Desire, who directed the scene that sees the two girls daring each other to hit on Luv after he walks past them on the public bus. “They let us do whatever we want to do. We did only one cut. We just got wild,” Lissa says. “I would never think before that I would suck a dick on the bus. That was really fun.” Lissa says it was an actual bus driver steering them through the streets of Budapest, Hungary, while some extras from her agency—Julia Grandi’s JulModels—played unsuspecting passengers. “We were going in circles and people from the window from other bus they would see maybe, I don’t know,” Lissa jokes. “And now fans, they are asking for another scene with Ella. They go crazy! They go nuts! I would shoot with her again, definitely.” Lissa spoke to AVN from the JulModels house in Budapest, where the agency is based. Lissa says she trusts her agent Julia Grandi—who is also a producer/director for Vixen Media Group—“100 percent.” “She always brings me the best dick,” Lissa says. “And I always say there are only two persons in this world that can decide with who I’m gonna have sex. It’s me and Julia Grandi. She never make mistake. I always have fun with her shooting, so I trust her.” Lissa grew up in the city of Izhevsk, the capital of Udmurtia, Russia, located along the Izh River in the western Ural Mountains. But now she considers herself “a citizen of the world.” “I live like a nomad life, like gypsy. I live in my luggage. I always travel. I cannot stay in one place longer than one week,” Lissa admits. “And it’s not just because I have a lot of friends around this world. But just like, by nature… I love Moscow. I try to live there but there’s no job. And I travel a lot. In one week I can go to five different countries sometimes. I take a bus, go to somewhere else. It’s crazy but I like it. I live on the go.” She says the news of her AVN Award turned into a hot topic in the media. “In Russia people call it porn Oscar—it went viral around all Russian news,” Lissa says. “Now everyone know my real name, where I’m from.  … My citizens, they proud of me—at least somebody got popular from our city. People are actually being really nice to me.” Lissa moved to Moscow when she was almost 17, using the last 20 dollars she had on the car to get there. “I’m so crazy,” she says. “I always felt like I want to explore the world. I cannot stay and live in a small city. I’m a citizen of the world. I felt like this.  “And I’ve always kind of been dreaming about doing porn but I was so shy in school. It would physically hurt me if I talked to strangers. I would start shaking. I never wanted to be like that, and so I kind of think that doing porn for me has changed me in a very good way because I overcame my fears, you know. Maybe in some very extravagant way. But it worked.” Lissa started webcamming a day after she turned 18, saying, “I felt like I’m in the right place.” “I really enjoyed it from the first day,” she remembers. “I felt like this is what I want to do. But I wasn’t sure if this business is exactly what I want to put my life on.  “And then I had a boyfriend. He made me stop webcam for some time and I started getting depressed. I felt like I need to share my sexual energy somewhere. I was missing this a lot. So after we broke up I felt like, OK, I want to try professional shooting. “And I tried it and after my first shooting I thought that they would never call me back and it was awful. But you see, here I am. It’s crazy. I still cannot believe this.” Lissa cammed mostly on MyFreeCams for about three years until she started easing into explicit scenes. She started with soft erotica. “I didn’t even masturbate. Then I started doing some masturbation. Then I started using toys. Then I met my agent and she proposed to me my first ever girl/girl shootings, but they were so soft. I didn’t even need test. We didn’t even kiss. We were just like caressing each other. It was so slow that I didn’t feel the pressure,” Lissa says. She did her first boy/girl sex scene in late June 2018—for Vixen under the direction of three-time AVN Director of the Year Greg Lansky. “Oh my god it was crazy. Greg Lansky shot my first video himself. Can you imagine how stressed I was? Greg Lansky himself came [to Europe] to shoot me,” Lissa says. “When I came to the production I was like, I’ve been told that I’m gonna shoot the next day. But then every day they would tell me, OK maybe they would move the shooting two days and then I ended up waiting for seven days. And every day I would get so excited, like oh my god I’m shooting tomorrow, but then it’s not tomorrow.  “Oh man, I didn’t masturbate for seven days. I still do it for shootings.” She worked with Vixen go-to guy Christian Clay, who has become a frequent scene partner.  “It was good. After that I shot like four or five scenes with Christian still. He’s like a star for Vixen and Tushy and everything. He’s like shooting a lot because he’s really a sex machine. Hi Christian,” Lissa says with a naughty grin. “He’s so fun. … He’s really nice.” Lissa says it she learned about herself through camming, starting out on Live Jasmin for a month before finding her rhythm on MFC. “That’s how I explored my sexuality and I learned to be good in front of camera. And before I would work as a waitress sometimes—two or three restaurants to pay my bills,” she says. “And I would help my classmates and do their homework instead of them for money. Then I’ve been selling pussy since 2017. “I had a cat—meow—and I would sell her kittens because she was expensive.” She says she wouldn’t mind camming again. “I tried to keep doing webcam when I just started but it was really hard and I miss these times. I think I would really like to start doing it again from time to time but for now I have a lot of shootings so…” Lissa says. “I would like to do it just to engage with my fans and talk to them more. I do Snapchat.  “Oh my god, I love Snapchat because it gives me a reason to fuck my friends. We’re having a dinner together and I’m like to my girlfriends from porn, ‘Oh, let’s go do show.’ It basically means, ‘Let’s go fuck.’ From porn business some girls come to me and say, ‘Do you want to shoot some content? Do you want to collaborate with me?’ And that means that they want to have sex with me and I’m like, oh my god I love my life. How can I can I be even more happier? Can you imagine?” When Lissa isn’t performing, she plays music. “I play ukulele. I always travel with it everywhere. I write my own songs,” she says. “I’m going to record some of them this year. But right now I’m so busy with shootings that I need to come back to Moscow and recording studio. I was supposed to go already back to Moscow. But I got more jobs, so that’s good.” Some of her songs are posted on her Instagram pages—@jialissaonly and her backup, @jialissareal. “Yeah, I write my own songs and poetries. I think any song starts from words. I write song if I have something to say. For me it’s important,” says Lissa, who also can play keyboard. "I used to study musical college. I used to play keyboard much better, but now as I travel I barely play. It’s like your fingers stop to listen to train every day.” She taught herself how to strum the ukulele. “I bought about a year ago and I try to play everyday. I have a very famous song between my fans. It’s called, ‘I Like to Masturbate,’” she reveals. “I get inspired on shootings and you know my colleagues, they call me…they joking that I’m ‘Jiayonce.' Because I like to cover songs… ‘If I were a boy I would fuck every girl.’” Lissa says she wants to continue shooting porn. “Of course. Oh my god. I don’t have in my plans to retire at all, no, no, no! I cannot imagine myself not posting my pussy all over the internet. Oh my god, no,” she says.   She also would like to grow her social media following and win more awards. “I still think there are some heights I can climb in Europe and still have a lot of job in Europe,” Lissa reasons. “What I want to say also, the people in my city, everybody talk. They come to my mom and you know what she say to them about my job? They ask her, ‘Do you watch her videos?’ And you know what she say to them, ‘Do you come to your kids at work, do you see what they are doing there? Why would I go watch my daughter at her job? I’m just proud that she’s successful.’” Lissa cherishes her strong relationship with her mom. “Before we had really hard times understanding each other. But now she understood me,” she adds. “… And I have a sister, she’s one year younger than me. And they all support me… So I don’t care what people say.” Photography courtesy of Vixen Media Group