Nina Dobrev (born Nina Konstantinova Dobreva; January 9, 1989) is a Bulgarian-Canadian actress. She played the role of Mia Jones, the single teenage mother on Degrassi: The Next Generation, from the show’s sixth to ninth season. She currently stars as Elena Gilbert and Katherine Pierce on The CW television teen drama The Vampire Diaries.
Dobrev was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and moved to Canada at the age of two, where she was raised in Toronto, Ontario. She speaks fluent French, English and Bulgarian. Her mother is an artist, and her father is a computer scientist. She has one older brother. She attended J. B. Tyrrell Sr. Public School and Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts in Scarborough, Ontario. From a very young age, she showed great enthusiasm and talent for the arts—dance, gymnastics, theater, music, visual arts, and acting. Dobrev attended the Dean Armstrong Acting school where she was discovered by many different talent agencies in Toronto.
Modeling jobs led to commercials, which then turned into film auditions. Shortly thereafter, she booked roles in feature films, including Fugitive Pieces, Away from Her, Never Cry Werewolf, and the television series Degrassi: The Next Generation. She also was in an MTV movie called The American Mall on CTV. She is currently starring in The CW’s drama The Vampire Diaries, playing the dual role of Katherine Pierce, a vampire that the same brothers each loved while they were still human during the American Civil War, and Katherine’s doppelgänger Elena Gilbert, a human who is caught between two vampire brothers.
She also had a minor role in the erotic thriller Chloe, theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics on March 26, 2010. The film grossed $3 million in the United States theatrically and became one of the higher-grossing specialty films in the United States in 2010 (according to Variety, “$3 million is the new $10 million” for specialty films’ box office in 2010).
In August 2010, Dobrev appeared in the opening sketch of the 62nd Primetime Emmy Awards.
Dobrev attended Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts in Toronto until her graduating year. She entered secondary studies at Ryerson University in Toronto, majoring in sociology, before dropping out in 2008 to pursue her acting career.
xoxo,
Nina Dobrev PH
