a cull of the pros<\/a>. Gone are Karen Hauer (the show\u2019s longest-serving female pro), Nadiya Bychkova, Luba Mushtuk, Gorka M\u00e1rquez and Michelle Tsiakkas (particularly cruel given that she only joined in 2022 and only ever had one celebrity partner \u2013 \u201cMy dream is shattered,\u201d she has said).<\/p>\nThis means the 15 remaining professionals are Dianne Buswell, Julian Caillon, Vito Coppola, Amy Dowden, Carlos Gu, Katya Jones, Neil Jones, Nikita Kuzmin, Lauren Oakley, Jowita Przystal, Johannes Radebe, Aljaz Skorjanec, Alexis Warr, Kai Widdrington and Nancy Xu. The BBC has also said that some new professionals will be announced soon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.telegraph.co.uk \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Who are the professional dancers? As the BBC refreshes the series for 2026, there has been something of a cull of the pros. Gone are Karen Hauer (the show\u2019s longest-serving female pro), Nadiya Bychkova, Luba Mushtuk, Gorka M\u00e1rquez and Michelle Tsiakkas (particularly cruel given that she only joined in 2022 and only ever had one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2454983,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[25507,24003,482538,348884,22221,346025,389770,344742,30156,22205,389769,392365],"class_list":["post-2454981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-bbc","tag-celebrity-news","tag-chris-bennion","tag-claudia-winkleman","tag-culture","tag-eastenders","tag-special-exclusion","tag-standard","tag-strictly-come-dancing","tag-television","tag-television-editors-choice","tag-tess-daly"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Strictly-2026-line-up-Who-are-the-celebrity-contestants.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2454981"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2454984,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454981\/revisions\/2454984"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2454983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2454981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2454981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2454981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}