Stephanie Faure

Main Achievements

• 2x Double Gold French Champion — Cleaned out her home nation’s premier circuit, taking double gold (weight and absolute) at the CFJJB French Nationals in both 2024 and 2025.
• 1st Place (Purple Belt) — CBJJ Brazilian Nationals / Brasileiro (2019 Champion)
• 2nd Place — IBJJF European Championship (2025 Black Belt Silver Medalist)
• 2nd Place — AJP Grand Slam, London (2025 Pro Division Finalist)
• 2nd Place (Purple Belt) — IBJJF World Championship (2019 Silver Medalist)
• 3rd Place — IBJJF World Championship (2024 Adult Black Belt Bronze Medalist)
• 2x 3rd Place — AJP Grand Slam, Rome (2024 / 2025 Main Bracket Podium Finisher)
• Elite Judo Continental Medalist — Captured gold at the French Seniors Semi-Finals and a prestigious bronze at the European Club Championships.

Overview

Stéphanie Caroline Delphine Faure is a highly accomplished French black belt competitor representing the global Checkmat and Pythagore associations. Holding elite black belt rankings across both Judo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Faure successfully engineered a lifelong high-performance judo competition background into a dominant career on the international sport jiu-jitsu circuit. Renowned for her exceptionally aggressive pacing, clean throwing matrices, and sophisticated outside guard passing, she has captured major titles across Europe and South America to position herself as one of Europe’s most formidable lightweight martial artists.

Early Life & French National Judo Team Base

Stéphanie Faure was born in October 1990 in Limoges, the historic city located in the west-central region of France. She spent her childhood navigating outdoor physical work on her parents’ countryside farm outside the city limits. At age nine, seeking a healthy athletic pastime, she initialized her combat sports education by stepping onto the mats of a local Judo training hall. Instantly falling in love with the uncompromised intensity of live sparring, she transitioned at age 12 into a specialized, regional sports center to test her attributes on France’s notoriously competitive national junior judo loops, culminating in a prestigious Judo black belt graduation in 2006 at just 16 years old.

To further sharpen her athletic blade against elite opposition, she moved her base to a high-performance academy room in Bordeaux, and subsequently to Orléans to balance a demanding higher education curriculum with a spot on the French Junior National Judo Team. Faure completed her formal Academic Engineering Degree in 2013, wrapping up a stellar senior judo chapter that featured an individual gold medal at the French Seniors Semi-Finals and a structural bronze medal at the European Club Championships.

Beach Grappling in Chile & The Brazilian Matrix

Following years of continuous physical impact at the national team level, Faure entered the professional workforce to secure capital before taking a one-year hiatus to travel globally. Burdened by multiple lingering sports injuries, she stepped away from competitive frameworks entirely during her travels to allow her body to recover. In January 2017, while executing a professional corporate contract in Frutillar, Chile, her attention was caught by a localized group of practitioners grappling in the sand along the beach. Upon discovering her high-level judo background, they invited her to visit their academy, enlisting her under the care of coach Daniel Carcamo. Re-energized and fully recovered, Faure accepted the trial and was instantly hooked on submission hunting.

Faure climbed rapidly to the rank of blue belt before returning to Europe, where she continued her technical evolution under Emmanuel Fernandez, who awarded her a purple belt in 2018. Driven to submerge her lifestyle directly within the roots of the art, she relocated to South America for a specialized corporate deployment in Brazil. She joined the historic Checkmat Equipe 1 room under the expert curation of master coach Sebastian Lalli. Inside the high-stakes Brazilian room, she refined her ground control mechanics and met her future husband and head coach, Marcelo Bruno De Souza. The pair spent three highly successful years training, instructing, and competing extensively across major Brazilian state brackets before migrating back to France in 2021 to establish their independent flagship academy in Limoges. On July 13, 2023, her exceptional technical lineage was formalized when Marcelo De Souza hand-awarded Stéphanie her black belt graduation.

Tactical Profile and Bow-and-Arrow Mastery

On the international tournament circuit, Professor Faure has constructed an elite lightweight operational template. By fusing her world-class judo footprint with an exceptionally sharp, high-percentage submission finishing rate, she refuses to play passive or stalling matches. Because of her ability to confidently dictate exactly where a match takes place using high-amplitude judo throws and precise grip fighting, she seamlessly bypasses complex guard-pulling traps to implement her favored outside passing configurations.

Nearly half of her elite professional black belt victories are secured via direct tapout, displaying a heavy statistical preference for clinical back-takes, rear-mount positional trapping, and razor-sharp bow-and-arrow lapel chokes. Validating her position as an independent, history-making force with consecutive absolute double gold titles at the French Nationals and podium finishes at the IBJJF Worlds and Europeans, Professor Stéphanie Faure stands as a premier symbol of multi-disciplinary transition, technical accuracy, and martial arts majesty.