Ana Cordeiro

Ana Laura Cordeiro’s route into elite jiu-jitsu began with a three-hour bus journey. She grew up in Minas Gerais and started training at 17 after seeing a cousin use the sport for fitness. Her family initially resisted the choice, yet she continued and travelled to Gracie Barra in Brasília in search of competition training. The journey had to fit around university, work with her father and time on the mat. The women’s competitive field she entered was still thin. Cordeiro has recalled advanced belt levels being combined because individual divisions were too small, sometimes leaving an athlete with only one match. She travelled to tournaments in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo to find deeper brackets. Her results therefore trace both her own rise and the structure women were being asked to compete within. At the 2007 IBJJF World Championship, Cordeiro won the purple-belt middleweight and open-class divisions. The following year, she took medium-heavyweight and open-class gold at the World No-Gi Championship in a combined brown-and-black-belt category. She repeated that double in the combined women’s brown-and-black division at the 2009 Pan Championship. In 2009, Márcio Feitosa invited Cordeiro to move to the United States and coach in Yorba Linda. Carlos Gracie Jr. promoted her to black belt that year. The move established a teaching role just as her first competitive ascent reached its highest belt level. Her career then stopped for reasons outside a tournament bracket. A CompNet profile reports that Cordeiro learned soon after the 2009 Pan title that a serious back condition required surgery and rehabilitation. She remained out of competition until 2014. The account presents a gap of roughly five years between her early run and her return. The comeback brought World titles in 2014 and 2015 and a Pan title in 2015. It also carried her into a different rule set. At the 2015 ADCC World Championship, Cordeiro won the women’s over-60-kilogram division. ADCC’s final-day report records that she beat Amanda Santana in the semifinal and Jessica Oliveira on points in the final. The title completed a return from surgery and rehabilitation to the top of a major submission-grappling championship. Cordeiro has since described the contrast between the women’s divisions of her early career and those that followed. She pointed to larger brackets, separate belt categories and rising technical levels. Speaking as a competitor and coach, she also argued that women need seminar invitations, sponsorship and visible positions of authority if more of them are to build full-time careers in the sport. Her own later work supplies a concrete example of that authority. Current Gracie Barra material presents Cordeiro as a fourth-degree black belt who owns and leads academies in Upland and Rancho Cucamonga, California. She also teaches an advanced GB2 curriculum online. Her work with Paulo Merlin shows the long arc of that role: Cordeiro and Rafael Pinto invited him to Gracie Barra Upland as a blue belt in 2018, then promoted him to purple belt and, in December 2022, black belt. The shape of Cordeiro’s story is larger than the championship sequence. She travelled for access when training and competitive fields were limited, built an elite record in combined divisions, and then had to rebuild after years away. Her later career places coaching, curriculum and the development of other athletes alongside the titles that marked her return.