Katalin Zamiar

Life and career

Katalin Zamiar holds a degree in anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she became a forensic science teacher. She has studied martial arts since 1982 and is an accomplished martial artist holding black belts in kung-fu, taekwondo, Gōjū-ryū karate and Shōrin-ryū karate. She has owned POW! Mixed Martial Arts and Chicago Krav Maga training centers since 2001. Along with teaching at her training center in downtown Chicago, she has often covered the UFC for Grappling magazine, focusing primarily on features and interviews. She has published more than 150 articles in various martial arts magazines including Black Belt and Inside Kung Fu, and has been featured in magazines such as Shape, Allure and Self. She has worked as an international fitness and martial arts presenter and has spent some time as a spokesperson for the Martial Arts brand Revgear. She has authored various conditioning materials and manuals and has featured in over a dozen workout and martial arts fitness videos. Additionally, she has organized summer training camps for aspiring basketball players and founded a non-profit charity named MAKE. In 2014, she published a book titled "Weight Training for Martial Arts."

Acting

Zamiar remains best known for her characterizations of the three female ninja characters Kitana, Mileena, and Jade in the 1993 fighting video game Mortal Kombat II (her video shoot costume was Kitana's blue; John Tobias created Mileena and Jade by altering the character colors to purple and green). The character of Jade was her idea. In 1997, Zamiar, together with Philip Ahn (Shang Tsung in MKII) and Elizabeth Malecki (Sonya in Mortal Kombat), filed a lawsuit against Midway Games for royalties for the home ports of the game, a case in which Midway emerged victorious. In 1995, she and fellow Mortal Kombat actors Ho Sung Pak (Liu Kang in MKII and her boyfriend at the time), Daniel Pesina, and Phillip Ahn appeared in Thea Realm Fighters, a never-released fighting game produced exclusively for the Atari Jaguar, as well having been in the also unreleased game Chi Yong that was planned for the PlayStation in 1994. In 1996, she portrayed a Jade-like ninja woman character named Chae Lee in the fighting game Catfight. In 2003, she played a minor part in the low-budget martial arts film Book of Swords; in a cameo nod to her Mortal Kombat alter egos, Katalin once again portrayed a female ninja character, dressed in similar clothing as her MKII counterparts and even wielding two sai as Mileena does (the movie also starred Pesina, Pak, and another Mortal Kombat actor, Richard Divizio, all of whom are seen in MK-style clothing/roles throughout the movie). She has reunited with the rest of the MKII cast for the 20th anniversary event at the Galloping Ghost Arcade.