Artur is what happens when a striker falls in love with the ground game... and he'll finish you everywhere.
Art's father put him in kickboxing when he was a teenager in Yerevan, Armenia. By the time his family won the lottery to come to America and moved to Glendale, he was 17 with a decade of combat sports behind him.
He ended up at KD MMA under Karen Darabedyan, a former pro MMA fighter who opened the gym in 2018. Karen is building a stable of killers out of the gym, and Art is one of them. He walked in as a striker, fell in love with grappling, and built the complete game. He finishes fights standing, on the ground, wherever it goes.
A decade later, he holds the UpNext Fighting flyweight belt, and not a single fight has gone to a decision. When he won the title, he dedicated the fight to somebody for the first time because it finally felt big enough.
His father.
The man who turned a sport into a life.
