Gabrieli Pessanha de Souza Marinho

Main Achievements

Black Belt Accolades (Weight & Absolute Division Dominance):

• 5x 1st Place — IBJJF World Champion (2021 / 2022 / 2023 / 2024 / 2025 — Continuous Double-Gold Supremacy)
• 2x 1st Place — IBJJF World No-Gi Champion (2024 / 2025)
• 5x 1st Place — IBJJF Pan American Champion (2021 / 2022 / 2023 / 2024 / 2025 — Weight & Absolute Double-Gold)
• 4x 1st Place — IBJJF European Open Champion (2022 / 2023 / 2024 / 2025 — Weight & Absolute Double-Gold)
• 4x 1st Place — CBJJ Brazilian National Champion (2022 / 2023 / 2024 / 2025)
• 2x 1st Place — AJP Abu Dhabi World Pro Champion (2021 / 2022)
• 1st Place — AJP Queen of Mats Champion (2020)

Overview

Gabrieli “Gabi” Pessanha de Souza Marinho is an absolute phenomenon of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and stands as one of the most thoroughly dominant, successful female competitors in the history of martial arts. Representing the InFight collective under her lifelong guide, Professor Marcio de Deus, Pessanha orchestrated an era of total supremacy by capturing multiple back-to-back IBJJF Grand Slams—winning the European Open, Pan American, Brazilian National, and World Championships in the exact same calendar year. Her unmatched technical pacing in the female Super-Heavyweight (Super Pesado) and Absolute categories cemented her status as a generational pound-for-pound icon.

Early Life and the City of God Social Project

Gabi Pessanha was born on August 8, 2000, in the historic but economically strained Cidade de Deus (City of God) neighborhood in Western Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Throughout her early childhood, she engaged in standard street sports, rotating between casual recreational soccer matches, ballet classes, and traditional Judo drills.

In 2010, visionary local coach Marcio de Deus established a grassroots social project offering completely free, high-tier Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu instruction to neighborhood youth, intending to utilize martial arts discipline to anchor children safely away from structural criminality. Initially, Gabrieli displayed zero interest in the sport, finding the close physical friction and unyielding combat mechanics highly unappealing. However, because her close neighborhood soccer peers joined the program en masse, she spent months sitting patiently on the sidelines watching their technical progressions. At age 11, she accepted coach Marcio’s open invitation to cross the threshold onto the canvas mats, where he immediately gifted her her first used, weathered gi, permanently igniting her martial journey.

Meteoric Colored Belt Rise to Pro Status

Pessanha’s unique anatomical leverage, spatial intelligence, and natural aptitude for submission mechanics were obvious from her earliest competitive outings. She ran through the local regional matrices to capture her inaugural CBJJ Brazilian National juvenile title as an orange belt in 2013.

Her career trajectory shifted from an elite pastime to a definitive lifelong profession following a difficult, narrow loss at the 2016 IBJJF Pan American Championships. The sting of defeat prompted a deep-seated mental re-evaluation, fueling an uncompromising, full-time professional training schedule. Her revamped work ethic yielded historic returns; as a purple belt in 2018, she completed her first flawless IBJJF Grand Slam campaign. Following her absolute devastation of the colored belt divisions—frequently defeating top black belts in mixed absolute brackets—Professor Marcio de Deus officially awarded Gabrieli her black belt in June 2019. At just 18 years old, she stood as one of the youngest black belt graduates on Earth.

An Unprecedented Era of Black Belt Domination

Upon her immediate transition into the elite adult black belt ranks, Pessanha launched an era of total division lock-down that transformed the landscape of women’s combat sports. Weaponizing a highly modern, incredibly sophisticated open guard architecture that combines unbreakable guard retention with lightning-fast sweep setups, she proved completely unstoppable on the international IBJJF circuit.

By securing five consecutive double-gold campaigns at the IBJJF World Championships, backed by matching dominance across the European Open, Pan American, and Brazilian National circuits, she became the premier standard-bearer for modern sport Jiu-Jitsu. Gabi Pessanha stands as a beautiful testament to the transformative power of social project coaching, evolving from a reluctant sideline observer in the City of God into the undisputed queen of global grappling.