Name	Karina Smirnoff
Height	5'5"
Naionality	kharkov
Date of Birth	2 January 1978,
Place of Birth	Kharkov, USSR [now Kharkiv, Ukraine]
Famous for

Smirnoff was born in Kharkov, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union on January 2, 1978. Her mother is Russian and her father is Jewish. When she was five years old, she began taking ballet lessons, followed by gymnastics, aerobics, figure skating, ballroom dancing and piano [3]. Eventually she chose to pursue ballroom dancing. In 1992, Smirnoff imigrated to the United States [4] and became a U.S. citizen. Once in the U.S., Smirnoff took time off from studying dancing for school.