Nina Dobrev (born 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.
Nina 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. From a very young age, she showed great enthusiasm and talent for the arts: dance, gymnastics, theatre, music, visual arts and acting.
Dobrev attended J. B. Tyrrell Sr. Public School and Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts in Scarborough, Ontario. She attended Ryerson University in Toronto, majoring in sociology. She left in 2008 to pursue her acting career.
While working on the show, she began dating her Vampire Diaries co-star Ian Somerhalder.
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 starred in a number of Lifetime original movies. 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 loved by two human brothers during the American Civil War, and Katherine's doppelgänger Elena Gilbert, a human who is caught between the same two brothers, now vampires, Damon and Stefan Salvatore.
She also had a minor role in the erotic thriller Chloe, theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics on March 26, 2010. The film had enjoyed commercial success and became director Atom Egoyan's biggest moneymaker ever.
In April 2011, she was cast as Candace in the film adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, alongside Logan Lerman, Emma Watson and Paul Rudd. Shooting began in May of that year in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and she completed her scenes on June 27, 2011.
In September 2011, Dobrev co-hosted We Day alongside Joe Jonas. We Day is organized by Free the Children. Dobrev also designed a T-Shirt with Me to We Style, which gives 50% of its profits to Free the Children.
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