Karina Smirnoff

Karina Smirnoff is a Ukrainian-born American International Latin dancer whose career spans elite professional competition, Broadway and television. Born in Kharkiv in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, she began competing in ballroom dance at eleven and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1993 while in her mid-teens. While developing into a championship dancer, she pursued formal education at Fordham University in New York, studying economics and information systems programming—a path that distinguished her from dancers who followed an uninterrupted competitive pipeline from childhood.

Smirnoff's early partnerships crossed national lines and competitive divisions. She competed as an amateur with Roman Nabatov for the United States before turning professional. With Paul Killick, representing England, she won the 1998 British National Professional Latin championship. She then partnered Louis van Amstel and won a United States national championship in 2000. Her most celebrated partnership was with Slavik Kryklyvyy, with whom she won five United States Professional Latin championships and reached second place at both the Blackpool Dance Festival and a Professional Latin World Championship. In 2005 they won the United Kingdom Professional Latin championship, an open-to-the-world title. Their competitive record placed them among the leading professional Latin couples of their era without reaching the World Professional Latin or British Open Professional Latin championship titles.

While competing at the highest level, Smirnoff and Kryklyvyy appeared in the 2004 film *Shall We Dance?*, bringing their partnership to a wider popular audience. After their competitive partnership ended in 2005, she briefly competed with Dmitri Timokhin. In later years, Smirnoff reunited with Kryklyvyy for exhibition performances, including Dance Legends in 2014 and the Millennium DanceSport Championships in 2017.

In 2006 Smirnoff joined ABC's *Dancing with the Stars* as a professional partner, entering a different dimension of dance work. The series required her to teach non-specialists, create weekly choreography across ballroom and Latin styles, and adapt difficulty to celebrity partners without professional training. She reached the season 3 final with Mario Lopez. Her breakthrough came in season 13, when she and actor and U.S. Army veteran J.R. Martinez won the Mirrorball Trophy in November 2011—her first championship on the series. She subsequently reached third place with Jacoby Jones in season 16 and second place with Corbin Bleu in season 17.

Smirnoff's stage work extended beyond television. In 2009 she appeared as a special guest star in the Broadway production of *Burn the Floor*, which combined ballroom and Latin vocabulary with jive, tango, swing and samba in a staged revue. She has continued teaching, creating dance-fitness material and appearing in workshops and exhibition events.