Mollena Williams-Haas, formerly Mollena Williams, is an American writer, BDSM educator, actor, and former International Ms. Leather. She is married to the composer Georg Friedrich Haas, who is the dominant partner in a BDSM relationship with her.
Early life
Mollena Lee Williams was born on June 20, 1969, at New York Hospital in Manhattan. Her parents, Marion and James Williams, met in 1968 while using Project TACT, one of the first dating services established in the United States. In 1973, her father took her to see the Broadway musicalHair over the objections of her mother. At the close of the show, she told her parents she wanted to be an actor. Within three years, she obtained a professional booking agent and began a performance career. An early performance was being an extra and singing on the soundtrack for the movie The Wiz, where she sang backup for Lena Horne. Moving to Los Angeles in 1992, she appeared in several independent films, including Skin and Bone. Notably, she co-starred in the independent cult classic , which has a script upon which she collaborated with Jack Perez. The movie also stars Danny Bonaduce and Melora Walters, and is widely considered the grandfather of "found footage" movies, predating Man Bites Dog and The Blair Witch Project. Her performance in it has been described as "brilliant."
It was during her years in Los Angeles that Williams began her explorations of BDSM, subscribing to the newsletter published by the Society of Janus and exploring kink and fetish via the newly burgeoning world of online chat forums. She has been involved with the leather subculture and BDSM since 1996. She was named Ms. San Francisco Leather in 2009 and International Ms. Leather in 2010. She contributed the essay “BDSM and Race Play” to Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Best Sex Writing 2010. In 2011 she published the book The Toybag Guide to Playing With Taboo. Her short filmIMPACT, which involves her participating in BDSM scenes, debuted in 2012. Also in 2012, she was given The Jack McGeorge Excellence in Education Award by the BDSM organization Black Rose. She won the National Leather Association International’s Cynthia Slater Non-Fiction Article Award in 2012 and 2013. Also in 2013, she shared the National Leather Association International’s Geoff Mains Nonfiction Book Award with Lee Harrington for their book Playing Well With Others: Your Field Guide to Discovering, Exploring and Navigating the Kink, Leather and BDSM Communities. In 2014 she was a guest on season 1, episode 6 of the Sunny Megatron show, on Showtime, speaking on and demonstrating the fetish commonly referred to as "race play”. In 2016 a piece about her BDSM relationship with her husband Georg Friedrich Haas was published in the New York Times. She is an inductee of the Society of Janus Hall of Fame.
