Dougie Joseph is the Australian model Nina Dobrev has reportedly been dating since June 2026. Neither of them has confirmed it, which breaks from how she’s handled every relationship before this one.
Nina Dobrev has posted about every serious relationship she’s had. When she started dating Shaun White in 2020, she shared a video of herself cutting his hair during lockdown, captioned “Adding to resume: hairdresser.” When he proposed in October 2024, she posted the news herself, writing “RIP boyfriend, hello fiancé.” That December, she marked their first holiday as an engaged couple with a caption that read “First Christmas as fiancées.”
This time, there has been no caption at all.
Dobrev has been photographed with Dougie Joseph, a 35-year-old Australian model, on two occasions. Neither she nor Joseph has said anything about it publicly.
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What’s confirmed so far
The first sighting came on June 18, 2026, when a fan sent a photo to the celebrity gossip account Deuxmoi showing Dobrev in New York City with a man later identified as Joseph. Paparazzi caught the two of them later that same day at the Knicks’ championship parade, their hands in each other’s back pockets.
Photographers caught them again on July 11, walking through the city with Dobrev’s dog, Maverick. She wore a navy slip dress; Joseph had his arm around her waist and kissed her on the cheek. PEOPLE reported that representatives for both of them did not respond to requests for comment.
That single outing set off an outsized reaction online. A Reddit thread about the photos drew thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments, many of them calling Joseph an upgrade from White. The comments under PEOPLE’s own Instagram post about the story ran the same way. None of that reaction came with any more information than the photos themselves provided.
Nothing has been reported since. Neither of them has posted a photo of the other, and neither has used the word boyfriend or girlfriend anywhere public. Two sightings and the reaction to them are the entire record so far.
Who is Dougie Joseph?
Before he became known as Nina Dobrev’s rumored new boyfriend, Joseph’s career was built almost entirely inside the fashion industry. He’s 35, born in November 1990, and originally from Bondi Beach, in Sydney. He was scouted to model at 21 while working at a shoe store, and told the modeling podcast Model Mentality in 2020 that visa problems delayed his move to New York for years before he finally relocated in 2015.
Since then, he has modeled for Ralph Lauren, Hugo Boss, Emporio Armani, Sandro Paris and R.M. Williams. In 2020, he co-founded a men’s skincare brand called Bondi Skin Co with two friends from home, marketed as natural, vegan and cruelty free. He’s 6’2″ and based in New York, though he still visits Australia often, occasionally posting from what looks like a family farm back home, including one caption noting his mother has banned him from riding a quad bike there.
Joseph hasn’t posted about Dobrev either. So far, the silence goes both ways.
What happened between Dobrev and Shaun White
The relationship before this one ended with far more detail attached. Dobrev’s five-year relationship with Olympic snowboarder Shaun White ended nearly a year ago. He proposed in October 2024 at a restaurant in New York, after telling Dobrev they were going to a fashion industry dinner. She said yes, and announced it herself.
Under a year later, in September 2025, PEOPLE confirmed the engagement was over. A source close to the couple gave this statement at the time:
“It was a mutual decision, and wasn’t an easy one, but it was made with love and a deep respect for one another.”
That was the version both sides seemed to settle on publicly. Privately, the accounts PEOPLE gathered didn’t fully agree. One insider said Dobrev was devastated by the split. Another pushed back, saying both of them had wanted marriage and kids, and that it wasn’t one sided.
A week after the breakup, Dobrev was photographed on a boat in Italy with a group that included Zac Efron, and tabloids ran with a dating rumor for weeks. In October 2025, a TMZ reporter asked her directly if she and Efron were together. She shook her head, then confirmed, when asked, that they were just mates.
The breakup got a clear statement and several sourced accounts of what happened, even where those accounts disagreed with each other. When an unrelated dating rumor came up, Dobrev answered a direct question about it, on camera, within weeks. The situation with Joseph looks nothing like that. There’s no statement, no named sources, and no sign anyone has gotten a direct answer out of her, the way TMZ did with Efron.
The timing on Shaun White’s side
White’s own next chapter followed a similar shape. He was first seen with model Angela Garten in early June 2026, about two weeks before Dobrev was first photographed with Joseph. Both relationships became public within the same narrow window, based on photographs, with no statement and no confirmation from either person involved.
White and Dobrev’s breakup got named sources and an actual statement. Neither of their next relationships has gotten either, and both still made headlines within two weeks of each other anyway. It may turn out to be exactly what it looks like. Neither person involved has said as much.
