Does Ciara Miller Have Dance Experience? Her Ballet Background Before DWTS Explained

Ciara Miller is not entering Dancing With the Stars Season 35 as a complete beginner. The Summer House star has revealed that she spent years learning dance while growing up, including roughly a decade of ballet training.

That experience could make Ciara one of Season 35’s contestants to watch, particularly when it comes to musicality, choreography and body control. However, her background should not be confused with the professional dance careers of fellow contestants such as Jenna Dewan and Harry Shum Jr. Ciara has not described herself as a professional dancer, and there is no indication that she previously trained seriously in competitive ballroom dancing.

For DWTS, she will have to turn an old foundation into a very different kind of dance skill alongside professional partner Brandon Armstrong.

Ciara Miller Did Ballet for 10 Years

Ciara first publicly discussed her dance background when Dancing With the Stars rumors began following her before she actually joined the show.

In a 2025 interview with Us Weekly, Ciara said she grew up dancing and specifically revealed that she did ballet for 10 years. At the time, she was already open about wanting an opportunity to compete on DWTS if the timing was right.

After she was eventually announced for Season 35, Ciara provided a little more context about that childhood experience. Speaking with Elite Daily, she said she was “pretty much in dance from the moment I could walk” and identified ballet, jazz and hip-hop among the styles she studied.

Related: DWTS Season 35 Judges and Hosts: Who Is Returning?

That means Ciara’s dance history is broader than simply taking a few ballet classes as a child. She spent a significant portion of her younger years around dance and should have some familiarity with learning choreography and performing movement to music.

What is less clear is exactly when she stopped training or how intensively she danced during each of those years. Ciara has not presented herself as someone who continued into a professional dance career.

Was Ciara Miller Ever a Professional Dancer?

No evidence suggests that Ciara Miller worked professionally as a dancer.

That is an important distinction in a Season 35 cast that contains celebrities with very different levels of previous experience.

Harry Shum Jr., for example, built part of his early career as a professional dancer and choreographer. Jenna Dewan also worked professionally as a dancer before becoming widely known as an actress.

Ciara’s background is different. Her confirmed experience comes from growing up taking dance classes, including her long ballet background.

Her adult career instead took her in other directions. Before becoming a regular on Summer House, Ciara worked as an ICU nurse and model. She later expanded her television career through shows including The Traitors and hosting work connected to Love Island USA.

So while calling Ciara a complete dance novice would be inaccurate, calling her a former professional dancer would be equally misleading.

Will Ciara’s Ballet Experience Give Her an Advantage on DWTS?

It could help, particularly early in the competition. Years of ballet can give a dancer an existing understanding of posture, balance, body lines, coordination and how to learn movement. Ciara may also find it easier than a true beginner to follow counts and remember choreography.

She has already suggested that she hopes some of that old training returns through muscle memory.

But Dancing With the Stars requires skills that are not automatically covered by ballet training. Ballroom and Latin styles come with their own technique, partnering, footwork, frame, hip action and performance expectations.

That makes Ciara’s situation interesting. She has enough dance experience to arrive with a foundation, but she still has something new to learn.

Even Ciara appears to be approaching the competition that way. Before Season 35 rehearsals, she discussed working on her stamina through activities including yoga and Pilates rather than suggesting her childhood dance experience would make DWTS easy.

Ciara Miller Is Dancing With Brandon Armstrong

Ciara has officially been paired with professional dancer Brandon Armstrong for Season 35.

The pairing is notable because Brandon was not originally the professional Ciara publicly had in mind. Months before the partnerships were revealed, she had mentioned Val Chmerkovskiy as someone she would like to dance with, saying she wanted a partner who would push her and take the work seriously.

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Season 35 ultimately put Val with Jenna Dewan and Brandon with Ciara.

For Brandon, the challenge will be figuring out how much of Ciara’s old dance training remains useful and how quickly she can translate it into ballroom technique.

Ciara’s 10 years of ballet mean viewers should not expect someone stepping onto a dance floor for the first time. At the same time, her background is considerably different from having competed professionally in ballroom.

That middle ground could make her one of the more interesting contestants to judge once Season 35 begins: experienced enough to have a head start, but still untested in the type of dancing that actually determines who wins the Mirrorball.