Katalin Rodriguez-Ogren (maiden name Katalin Rodriguez Zamiar, best known as Katalin Zamiar) (born August 12, 1971 in Chicago) is a Cuban American martial artist, sportswriter, and martial arts actress.

Biography

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.

Zamiar is 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). 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 the game 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 as in the unreleased game Chi Yong that was planned for the PlayStation. Later she also made two martial arts conditioning videos with Pak. In 1996, she portrayed a Jade-like ninja woman character named Chae Lee in the PC all-women fighting game Catfight. In 2003, she played a minor part in the 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). In 2014, she has reunited with the rest of the MKII cast for the 20th anniversary event at the Galloping Ghost Arcade.

Along with teaching at her training center in downtown Chicago, Zamiar has often covered the Ultimate Fighting Championship 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, among others, and has been featured in Shape, Allure and Self magazines. She has worked as an international fitness and martial arts presenter, teaching at various conferences from Taipei to Aruba, and has spent some time as a spokesperson for the MMA gear firm Revgear. She has also written conditioning materials and manuals and can be seen in more than a dozen of workout fitness/martial arts videos. Her other endeavors have included a summer training camp for upcoming basketball players and a non-profit charity M.A.K.E. In 2014, she wrote the book Weight Training for Martial Arts.