Nina Dobrev by Steve Erle for Ocean Drive Magazine September 2012

Nina Dobrev (born January 9, 1989) is a Bulgarian-Canadian actress. She has played the role of Mia Jones, the single teenage mother on Degrassi: The Next Generation, since the show's sixth season. She currently stars as Elena Gilbert in the TV series 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. Her mother is an artist while her father is a computer specialist. She has one older brother, Aleksander, who is studying to become an engineer. 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 Elena Gilbert, a human who is caught between two vampire brothers, and Elena's doppelgänger Katherine Pierce, a vampire that the same brothers each loved while they were still human during the American Civil War.