Mia Khalifa

Mia Khalifa was born Sarah Joe Chamoun in Beirut, Lebanon. Her family moved to the United States in 2001, and she was raised in Montgomery County, Maryland. She attended a French-language private school in Beirut, Massanutten Military Academy in Virginia, and Northwest High School. During high school, she played lacrosse.

She graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso with a Bachelor of Arts in history. While in college, she supported herself through work as a bartender, model, and briefcase girl on a Spanish-language game show. She also briefly worked at the fast-food chain Whataburger.

Khalifa entered the adult-film industry in October 2014 after being approached about nude modeling. Her professional name combined the name of her dog, Mia, with the surname of rapper Wiz Khalifa. Her rise to prominence followed the release of a Bang Bros scene in which she wore a hijab, an image that prompted criticism from writers and religious figures and drew international attention.

She was also identified as the site's most-searched-for actress in 2018, despite having worked in filmed pornography for approximately three months. During this period, she received online death threats, including a digitally manipulated image depicting her execution by the Islamic State.

Khalifa left the filmed adult industry after signing a contract with the parent company of Bang Bros and resigning two weeks later. She continued working as a webcam model for eleven months before moving toward sports media and other public-facing work. She has advocated for sex workers' rights and spoken about her efforts to separate her later career from her time in the adult industry.

After leaving filmed pornography, Khalifa worked as a paralegal and bookkeeper in Miami before developing a career as a social media personality and webcam model. She has used platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, and Patreon to publish material about style, food, politics, and sports.

Khalifa and former basketball player Gilbert Arenas co-hosted Out of Bounds, a daily sports show on Complex News, from October 2017 to February 2018. She later co-hosted Sportsball with Tyler Coe on Rooster Teeth, with the final episode released in October 2018.

Her entertainment appearances include a guest role as herself in the Hulu series Ramy in 2020 and a cameo in Bella Poarch's music video for “Build a Bitch” in 2021. In 2023, she launched the jewelry line Sheytan with Sara Burn and appeared in the Fall/Winter 2023 campaign for the London fashion label Aries and its photo book Mia by Aries.

Khalifa married her high school boyfriend in February 2011. They separated in 2014 and divorced in 2016. In 2019, she married Swedish professional chef Robert Sandberg, and they separated in 2020.

She was in a relationship with Puerto Rican rapper and singer Jhayco from 2021 to 2022. In 2021, Khalifa auctioned the glasses she had worn in several adult films to raise money for people affected by the 2020 Beirut explosion.

Khalifa has said that she is no longer a practicing Catholic. She has tattoos of the opening line of Lebanon's national anthem in Arabic and the Lebanese Forces Cross. She connected the latter tattoo to her father's political views after a 2012 bombing in Beirut.

She criticized U.S. military aid to Israel in 2021 and referred to Israel as an apartheid state. After the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023, she voiced support for Palestine. Her political comments led to the cancellation of business partnerships with Playboy and an Amsterdam-based drug-product company.