Bianca Basílio "Bia"

Bianca Basílio, widely known in the sport as Bia Basílio, was born on February 2, 1996, in Franca, a city in the São Paulo countryside of Brazil. She came from a family of modest means, and by her own account jiu-jitsu became both an athletic outlet and a genuine path out of poverty. She started in gymnastics as a child before discovering Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu around age 12, and the sport's technical, problem-solving nature suited her instincts immediately — she has described her early rise through the ranks as feeling almost inevitable once she found the right gym.

Basílio's climb through the colored belts was exceptional even by elite standards: she won IBJJF World titles at the juvenile level as a blue belt in the early 2010s and continued collecting World gold at purple and brown belt through 2016, when she was promoted to black belt by Caio and Diego Almeida at the end of that year. The transition to black belt competition, however, proved far more grinding than her colored-belt run — it took roughly five years of near-misses before she broke through for her first black belt IBJJF World title, a gap that speaks to how much deeper and more competitive the black belt featherweight division is compared to the colored belts, even for someone with her pedigree.

In the meantime, Basílio built one of the more decorated no-gi résumés among her peers. In 2019, she won the ADCC World Championship, one of the most prestigious titles available in submission grappling, and she added multiple Abu Dhabi World Pro Grand Slam titles across 2018, 2019, and 2021, along with Pan American gold medals. She finally captured her first IBJJF black belt World Championship title in 2022, defeating 2018 champion Amanda Canuto on advantages, and followed it with a second World title in 2023 at featherweight, beating two-time champion Anna Rodrigues in the final — a result she called validation for years of near-misses at the sport's biggest gi tournament.

Basílio's competitive ambitions expanded beyond pure grappling in the early 2020s, when she signed with Team Bahrain and began training for mixed martial arts. She built an amateur and then professional MMA record without a loss, both wins coming by submission, and won gold with Team Bahrain at the 2022 IMMAF Super Cup. She made her ONE Championship debut in November 2022 in a women's strawweight submission grappling bout, finishing Milena Sakumoto by submission in the first round, and continued competing on ONE's submission grappling and MMA cards over the following years as one of the promotion's most credentialed jiu-jitsu imports.

Basílio's story resonates in the sport as one of the clearest examples of a lifelong gi competitor successfully expanding into no-gi submission grappling, MMA, and international promotion without ever losing her technical identity as an Almeida-trained featherweight. Her combination of a genuine ADCC World title, multiple IBJJF World Championships across colored and black belt, and a still-active professional fighting career gives her a résumé that few of her contemporaries can match, and she remains one of the most recognizable Brazilian women in grappling today.

Explosive, submission-oriented grappler known for fast-paced scrambles, guard passing, and a knack for quick finishes carried over into MMA