Emily Kwok

Emily Kwok was the first Canadian to become a Jiu-Jitsu world champion. In 2007, at the first Worlds held in the United States, she won middleweight in the division that combined brown and black belts. She was a brown belt and, in the final, beat black belt Luciana Dias 17-0.

Born on October 5, 1980, in Aomori, Japan, to a Japanese mother and a Chinese father, she grew up in Vancouver, Canada. She started Jiu-Jitsu in 2001, after short spells in boxing and sambo. She received her blue belt from Renzo Gracie, her purple from Takashi Ouchi and, in December 2008, her black belt from Ricardo Almeida, the first for a Canadian woman.

As a black belt she was a No-Gi world champion in 2010, the year she also took bronze at the Worlds and opened Princeton BJJ with Art Keintz. She returned to competition in the masters divisions and won the 2018 World Master, the 2022 Pans and the 2023 Europeans.

Off the mat she works in peak performance consulting and runs Jiu-Jitsu camps. Among the lessons she says the sport taught her, one is on the academy’s website: “Nothing worthwhile in life is ever easy.”