Kathleen Teresa Martínez Berry (born 1966) is a Dominican lawyer, archaeologist, and diplomat, best known for her work since 2005 in the search for the tomb of Cleopatra in the Taposiris Magna temple in Egypt. She heads the Egyptian-Dominican mission in Alexandria, and is currently minister counselor in charge of cultural affairs at the Dominican embassy in Egypt.
Kathleen Martínez was born in Santo Domingo in 1966. Her father, professor and legal scholar Fausto Martínez, owned an extensive private library, which she drew on to research the subject which would become her great passion – Egypt and the last days of Cleopatra. Her mother is of Franco-English descent.
Despite her childhood passion for Egypt, Martínez focused her early studies on a legal career. "My parents had convinced me that it was not worthwhile for me to be an archaeologist because I would never have a serious job and could not make a living from that profession. They convinced me," she explained in some of her interviews. Like her father, she studied law, attending the Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña, as well as going to study English at Brown University in the United States. She graduated at 19, and began working as a lawyer. She also holds master's degrees in finance and archaeology.
Her obsession with Cleopatra – she has explained repeatedly in the press – was born out of an argument with her father in 1990, and a group of friends who considered that her biography was not very significant. Studying the history of Cleopatra, regardless of Roman propaganda and centuries of prejudice against women – Martínez asserts – allowed her to discover a woman ahead of her time, who studied at the university, who had to suffer the denigration of the Romans. "She knew medicine, laws; she was a philosopher, a poet," Martínez explains. After advancing in her research, she discovered the difference between oriental texts and ones written by the Romans. She studied – she explains – the canonical texts in detail, in particular Plutarch's account of Mark Antony's alliance with Cleopatra. She also found that modern researchers had quite possibly missed important clues about where she was buried.
