Dominyka Obelenyte

Dominyka Obelenyte left the 2016 Worlds with two golds for the second year in a row. At super-heavyweight she won the final against Venla Luukkonen 33-0. In the open class she submitted Rosamond Snow in her first match, beat Fabiana Santos on a referee decision, defeated Mackenzie Dern 6-4 in the semifinal and edged Bia Mesquita on advantages after a 2-2 final.

Born on July 30, 1995, in Kaunas, Lithuania, she moved to the United States at 6. She did traditional jujutsu and taekwondo before starting Jiu-Jitsu at 9 in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. She trained at TLI in Maryland, where JT Torres gave her the green belt, and Emily Kwok sent her to Marcelo Garcia in New York. Garcia promoted her to brown belt at 17 and to black belt on January 15, 2015, at 19. She was the first woman he promoted to black belt.

In her first year at black belt she won her division and the open class at Worlds, plus Pans and the Europeans. In June 2015 she started a petition for equal prize money for women, and the IBJJF reviewed its payouts. In September 2016 she left Marcelo Garcia’s academy. She won the Atlanta Winter Open in February 2017, in her division and the open class, and after a shoulder injury stepped away from competition to study at Columbia University. In her recorded career she lost once, to Mackenzie Dern on a referee decision in the open class semifinal at the 2015 Europeans.

She now lives in Los Angeles, where she works as a visual artist and muralist and teaches at Frogtown Jiu-Jitsu. “If you’ve ever trained with me, you know how important bjj has been to my career, health and overall life,” she wrote in a recent post.