Sarah Jane Nader, the youngest of the Nader sisters, is heading to Dancing With the Stars Season 35, paired with Hailey Bills—the show's second all-female duo. Known from Hulu's "Love Thy Nader," she came out as bisexual in Season 1 and has since become an LGBTQ+ advocate. She's recently been linked to Pete Davidson, though nothing's confirmed. DWTS premieres September 15 on Disney+ and ABC.
"Let's Dance!!": Sarah Jane Nader Makes History as DWTS' Second All-Female Pairing
When Sarah Jane Nader posted "Let's Dance!!" on Instagram earlier this month, the caption barely hinted at how significant the announcement really was. The 23-year-old reality star and model had just been confirmed for season 35 of Dancing With the Stars, paired with professional dancer Hailey Bills. On paper, it's a casting update. In practice, it makes Nader and Bills only the second all-female celebrity duo in the show's history and the third same-sex pairing overall, following JoJo Siwa and Jenna Johnson in 2021 and Shangela and Gleb Savchenko in 2022.
The pairing wasn't accidental. According to DWTS executive producer Conrad Green, Nader made it clear early on that she wanted a female partner, and the production team noticed something in her chemistry with Bills that they couldn't ignore. Green has said the two simply worked well together, and that Bills, a first-time professional this season, was fully on board with the idea from the start.
For longtime viewers of the franchise, the pairing is a small but meaningful shift in a show that has spent two decades pairing celebrities with dancers of the opposite sex almost without exception. For Nader, it's personal. She's talked about watching Dancing With the Stars as a kid and never once seeing two women paired together on the dance floor. Now she gets to be part of changing that, and she's said she hopes some younger version of a viewer out there will watch her and Bills and feel represented in a way she never got to as a child.
Dancing With the Stars season 35 premieres September 15 on Disney+ and ABC, and Nader arrives with a family connection already built in. Her older sister Brooks Nader competed on season 33 of the show in 2024, dancing with pro Gleb Savchenko. Sarah Jane is stepping into a ballroom her sister already knows well, but she's doing it on her own terms.
From Shame to Self-Acceptance: How Sarah Jane Nader Found Her Voice on "Love Thy Nader"
Before Dancing With the Stars, most audiences knew Sarah Jane Nader as the youngest of the four Nader sisters on Hulu's Love Thy Nader, a reality series that follows Brooks, Grace Ann, Mary Holland, and Sarah Jane as they navigate careers, relationships, and each other's business between New York City and Los Angeles. The show premiered in August 2025 and quickly built a following, in part because of how openly it let Sarah Jane's personal story unfold on camera.
It was during the first season that Nader came out as bisexual, a moment that centered on bringing a woman named Eliana home to Louisiana for Easter. It wasn't a small storyline tucked into a side episode. It became one of the more talked-about threads of the season, and Nader has said the significance of it went far beyond entertainment.
Speaking about the experience, Nader explained that her sexuality had never really been discussed within her extended family before the show. It wasn't necessarily rejected outright, but it was quietly avoided, something she described as being "danced around" rather than confronted directly. Filming the show forced a kind of honesty that years of family gatherings hadn't.
Growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in a religious household, Nader has said she carried real shame about being queer for much of her life. She's credited her move to New York and the years she spent surrounded by openly queer classmates at Fordham University with helping her unlearn that shame. Being around people who treated their own identities as unremarkable, she's said, made her realize she didn't have to keep hiding or carry guilt about who she was.
That shift from silence to openness didn't happen all at once, and Nader has been fairly candid that it came with real fear attached. Long before Love Thy Nader ever aired, she was in a serious relationship with a woman she loved deeply but felt she couldn't bring home. She's said the hesitation wasn't about her own comfort so much as protecting her partner from a household and community that might not have been kind to her.
Eliana, Alexis, and Pete Davidson Rumors: Inside Sarah Jane Nader's Dating Timeline
Nader's dating life has become a recurring thread across her public story, partly because Love Thy Nader chose to feature it so directly, and partly because her rising profile has made every outing newsworthy.
The relationship with Eliana was the first to play out on screen, marking the moment Nader's family and audience learned about her sexuality at the same time. After that relationship, viewers also saw her connect with Alexis Williams, a deputy press secretary for the City of New York whom she reportedly met through social media. The two were shown going on a date to Henrietta Hudson, a well-known lesbian bar in the West Village, with Nader describing the early chemistry between them simply as "vibing."
Neither of those relationships appears to be ongoing at this point. As of early September, reporting suggests Nader is single, though she recently found herself at the center of new speculation after being spotted with Saturday Night Live alum Pete Davidson in Brooklyn on August 2. The two haven't addressed the outing publicly, and nothing about it has been confirmed as romantic. It's entirely possible it was nothing more than two people in the same industry crossing paths, but that hasn't stopped the rumor mill from running with it.
One relationship that has been repeatedly clarified, somewhat firmly, is the one between Nader and her DWTS partner Hailey Bills. Despite the natural curiosity that comes from pairing two women together on a show built around physical closeness and performance, there's no indication the two are anything other than dance partners. Reports have been careful to note that Nader's openness about her sexuality shouldn't be mistaken for evidence of a relationship with Bills specifically. Their connection, at least publicly, has stayed professional.
"Young Me Watching Me": Why Sarah Jane Nader's DWTS Pairing Means More Than a Dance Contest
For all the attention on choreography, costumes, and judges' scores, Nader has been clear that her time on Dancing With the Stars carries weight that goes beyond the competition itself. In her own words, she's said it feels like an honor to represent something she never got to see growing up, and that watching herself paired with another woman on a mainstream network show is the kind of image she wishes had existed when she was younger.
That sentiment lines up with how she's talked about her broader platform. She's said that being part of someone else's journey toward feeling comfortable with who they are matters to her, and that seeing the impact of her openness has pushed her to keep sharing more of her life publicly rather than pulling back.
Nader isn't the only LGBTQ+ competitor on this season's roster. She's joined by pansexual Olympic figure skating gold medalist Amber Glenn, who is paired with pro Pasha Pashkov this season. Together, their presence marks one of the more visibly queer casts in the show's recent history, alongside a lineup that includes Tatyana Ali, Jenna Dewan, Harry Shum Jr., Julia Stiles, Giada De Laurentiis, Taylor Hanson, Maura Higgins, Conner Leavitt, Ciara Miller, Tyler Cameron, Jackson Olson, Guillermo Rodriguez, and Connor Wood.
Whether or not Nader and Bills make it deep into the competition, the pairing itself has already accomplished something the show rarely gets credit for outside of its dedicated fanbase. It's given a young, openly bisexual woman a mainstream, prime-time platform to be exactly who she is, without having to explain or soften it for the cameras. For Nader, who spent years feeling like her identity was something to work around rather than talk about, that alone seems to be the point. Dancing With the Stars season 35 premieres September 15 on Disney+ and ABC.