Aja (Pornstar)

About Aja (Pornstar)

Aja from Tampa, Florida, posed for 32 covers, 5 photosets, and 28 videos.

Aja is an exotic dancer and porn star. She is sometimes credited as Barbara Holder. She also works as a director of pornographic films and a fitness trainer. Growing up, she was a self-described "army brat", traveling from Portland, Maine to overseas in Germany. She eventually moved to Florida, settling in Fort Lauderdale.

Like many pornographic actresses, she started out as an exotic dancer. She was introduced to it by a girl friend who was a straight-A college student. She began her forays into pornography after convincing her husband, John Derringer, to move to California. She took her stage name from a Steely Dan album called "Aja". (The proper pronunciation is similar to "Asia" with a soft "J".) Her mentor was Sharon Mitchell. Her career started in 1988 in Wild in the Woods. Her then-husband did all of her anal sex sequences; since her divorce, she refuses to do any sex scenes of that nature.

During this time, she had drug addiction problems, particularly with heroin. In the 1990's she was helped by John T. Bone, a pornographic director, and was also on a methadone maintenance program. In Canada, Bone later locked her in a hotel room for three weeks, thus helping her go "cold turkey".

She left on her first hiatus from porn films in 1992, using the fame she earned in pornography to enhance her exotic dancing career. Since then, she has worked in pornographic films on and off, both in front of and behind the camera.

In 1997, after growing tired of an on-the-road exotic dancing career, she started her pornographic production company called Golden Orchid Productions. In 2000, Aja became owner and producer of Pleasure Dome Productions, an adult video production company after its acquisition by Golden Orchid.

She was one of the few box cover pretty(a pornstar who often appeared on a movie's box cover using her beauty to sell the movie) pornstars to ever do scenes with shemales which was heavily frowned upon especially in the 80s when AIDS was so prevalent. She did two movies with various shemales near the start of her career in 1988 but never did any movies beyond those two. Her mentor Sharon Mitchell booked her in the movies and also starred in one of them.

She was a follower of the Asatru religion. She had two children from her marriage to John Derringer.

In 2006, September 18, she passed away in Mexico. No details of her death were given.

She was 1989 AVN's Best New Starlet and Starlet of the Year by XRCO winner.