The first Dancing With the Stars season 35 troupe member has been revealed!
News broke at DWTS Con on Sunday, August 2, that Kamri Peterson will perform in the troupe for the upcoming season of the hit ballroom competition. The rest of the cast lineup is set to be announced at a later date.
DWTS fans will remember Kamri, now 18, as one of the “junior pros” on the short-lived youth version of the competition. DWTS: Juniors only ran for one season in 2018, where Kamri cha-cha’d with former Scripps National Spelling Bee champ Akash Vukoti under the tutelage of mentor Witney Carson. (Skateboarder Sky Brown and JT Church ultimately won the show as members of Team Alan Bersten.)
After leaving DWTS: Juniors, Kamri has continued her ballroom training and even worked alongside fellow pros Rylee Arnold and Ezra Sosa, in addition to longtime choreographer Mandy Moore. She also attended multiple season 34 tapings last year, in which Witney, 32, took home the mirrorball with celebrity partner Robert Irwin.
As for her professional accolades, Kamri has won the World ProAm champions, is a three-time Latin National Vice Champion and a 12-time Latin finalist. She also once represented the United States at the Open World Championships in Paris.
Kamri is far from the first DWTS: Juniors star to make the leap to the main show. Rylee, 21, was named a pro on DWTS for 2023’s season 32, while Hailey Bills made her troupe debut in season 34.
The rest of the DWTS pro roster has not been revealed, with the dancers often learning the news just weeks (or days) before the public.
“Typically, once we have a list of the pros that are gonna be on, we then, at some point, we’ll get the opportunity to hear who’s gonna be [on the show],” show host Alfonso Ribeiro exclusively told Us in September 2025. “But it’s never final, right? It’s ever-changing, and there were some pairings that were different three weeks ago [this year].”
Ribeiro, 54, further explained that dance partnerships can continue “to evolve” as casting changes up until the premiere date.
“You realize, ‘Oh, actually, this is a better pairing than that pairing.’ And they work on it right up until the final day until [the stars and pros] meet each other,” Ribeiro told Us, adding that show executives Deena Katz, Conrad Green and Rob Mills “always get it right” with teams. “They figure it out. I don’t know how they do it, but they always figure out how to put the right people together. They’re magical.”
The celebrity contestants of season 35 will include Ciara Miller, Maura Higgins, Jackson Olson and Guillermo Rodriguez, with even more yet-to-be-announced famous faces also set to tango across the dance floor.
Dancing With the Stars season 35 premieres concurrently on ABC and Disney+ Tuesday, September 15, and Wednesday, September 16, at 8 p.m. ET and streams the next day on Hulu.
