Who Is Adele Zaikman? Meet DWTS Season 35’s New Pro

Adele Zaikman is no longer simply one of the breakout dancers from Dancing with the Stars: The Next Pro. The 24-year-old professional Latin dancer won Season 1 after defeating AJ Pritchard and Selena Hamilton in the finale, earning a guaranteed professional position on Dancing with the Stars Season 35. Long before appearing on ABC, Adele had already built an elite competitive ballroom career, including a major Blackpool Dance Festival victory. Her next challenge will be completely different: taking responsibility for a celebrity partner in one of television’s most demanding dance competitions.

How old is Adele Zaikman and where is she from?

Adele Zaikman is 24 years old and turns 25 on September 30, 2026. She is from Israel and has Israeli-Ukrainian roots, although her professional career has since brought her to Los Angeles, where she works as both a performer and dance teacher. That international background fits naturally with a career built around competitive Latin dancing, where partnerships and competitions frequently take dancers around the world. Winning The Next Pro now gives her a much larger American television platform than she had before joining the series.

Adele was relatively unknown to casual DWTS viewers when the spinoff began, especially compared with AJ Pritchard, who already had several seasons of Strictly Come Dancing behind him. Her reputation inside competitive dance was very different. She entered the show with serious credentials and quickly established herself as one of the technically strongest contestants in the cast.

What did Adele do before DWTS: The Next Pro?

Adele was already an accomplished professional Latin dancer before ABC cast her. One of the biggest achievements on her resume is winning the Professional Rising Stars Latin competition at the Blackpool Dance Festival in 2022, one of the most respected events in competitive ballroom dancing. She had also previously reached the podium at Blackpool in the Amateur Rising Stars Latin division. Those results explain why the judges rarely questioned whether Adele understood ballroom technique.

Her bigger challenge on The Next Pro was proving that competition success could translate into television. Dancing with a highly trained professional partner is very different from teaching celebrities who may have almost no ballroom background. Over the season, Adele gradually showed that she could adjust choreography, coach partners and make decisions under the kind of time pressure DWTS professionals face every week.

That development became one of the strongest arguments for her eventual victory. The finale judges were no longer simply praising how Adele herself moved. They were praising what she could get out of the person dancing beside her.

Why did Adele stand out so much on The Next Pro?

Adele was one of the season’s most consistently safe contestants and never developed the repeated elimination scares that affected some of her competitors. The judges admired her precision almost immediately, but they also pushed her to become less controlled and create larger television moments. Adele’s biggest evolution was learning that DWTS requires more than technically correct choreography.

That became particularly obvious during the later teaching challenges. Adele could be demanding, but she also showed an ability to identify what her partners needed and adjust when a routine was not working exactly as planned. By the semifinals, established DWTS professionals were describing her work as something that could already appear on the flagship series.

The finale confirmed that impression. Adele taught Nev Schulman a samba that received a standing ovation, then built her freestyle around a dramatic paso doble rather than trying to cram every possible style into one routine. Shirley Ballas called Adele a magical teacher and said her skills were second to none. That kind of feedback went directly to the reason The Next Pro existed.

Who is Adele Zaikman’s boyfriend Cătălin Caucă?

Adele is dating fellow professional dancer Cătălin Caucă, who is also her competitive dance partner. Cătălin is a Romanian professional Latin dancer and international dance coach who teaches in California. Their relationship therefore overlaps heavily with Adele’s professional life, since the two train, compete and perform together.

They connected in 2025 after Adele spent months looking for a new professional partner. They first danced together in April of that year, and their partnership soon became romantic as well. By June 2025, Adele had publicly shared their relationship.

Cătălin’s presence is relevant to understanding Adele’s development because high-level competitive ballroom careers depend heavily on long-term partnership work. The person viewers saw teaching and adapting on The Next Pro already had years of experience working inside demanding professional partnerships rather than learning those skills specifically for television.

What happens to Adele after winning The Next Pro?

Adele now becomes a professional dancer on Dancing with the Stars Season 35. That is the actual competition prize, not simply an invitation to audition again or a place in the troupe. She will receive a celebrity partner and be responsible for teaching, choreographing and guiding that person through the weekly competition.

The transition is unusually fast. The Next Pro finale aired on August 31, while Season 35 begins with its two-night premiere on September 15 and 16. Adele therefore goes from winning her televised job audition to performing that job only weeks later.

The biggest immediate question is who will be standing beside her. Reports and online clues already point toward one particular Season 35 celebrity, but the official full cast and pairing announcement is scheduled for September 2. Adele spent the summer proving she could become a DWTS professional. Season 35 will reveal whether she can turn that promise into a successful celebrity partnership.