Melody Damayo (born July 3, 1973) is a model, film director, and actress of Filipino descent best known as Mimi Miyagi. In 2011, Complex magazine ranked her at #12 in their list of "The Top 50 Hottest Asian Porn Stars of All Time". Early life and education Melody Damayo was born in Davao City, the second of four children, to conservative Seventh-day Adventist parents. When she was six, she moved to the United States with her parents, and she grew up in California. Damayo went back to Mindanao for high school, and her family enrolled her in a Seventh-day Adventist academy (Mindanao Mission Academy) in Misamis Oriental, hoping she would absorb Filipino values. After finishing high school, she enrolled in an Adventist college in Bukidnon, studying finance and economics at Mountain View College, but she dropped out in her second year. She says she had been a disc jockey on the college radio station and had decided on a career in show business. Damayo returned to Los Angeles and obtained a scholarship to the American College for Fashion Merchandising, but, once again, she dropped out without graduating when she had run out of money and began looking for jobs. By age 18, she had become a Certified Master Makeup Artist at the makeup artistry school at FOX studios in Hollywood. Adult film career and mainstream appearances She took some part-time gigs as a go-go dancer at an Asian nightclub in Beverly Hills, before transitioning into adult films and nude modeling. Damayo says she saw an advertisement for nude models and answered it. She took the name "Mimi", the childhood nickname given by her grandmother. "Miyagi" was derived from the character Mr. Miyagi in the film The Karate Kid, although she has nothing to do with him. She says she cloaked her actual ethnicity in Asian mysticism. In 1996, she retired from adult film acting and moved to Henderson, Nevada. She married a former professional football player. She hired a consultant to set up a website (MimiMiyagi.com), then got embroiled in a legal battle over control of the domain name. In 1998, she appeared in an America Undercover documentary entitled Strippers: The Naked Stages. She was the publisher of the erotic American Asian magazine Oriental Dolls (now known as Asian Hotties). In 2001, after a divorce, she quietly dedicated herself to several humanitarian and animal volunteer organizations. Nearly bankrupted by her