At fourteen, Evgenij Voznyuk was already a national champion. At twenty-three, he reached the final of Germany’s most prestigious Latin dance competition as an independent athlete. At twenty-nine, he took the German title outright. He has since worked as a choreographer for one of Europe’s most-watched Saturday night television programmes, co-built a dance school enterprise near Frankfurt running more than 75 classes a week, and personally driven to the Ukrainian border to bring back civilians during the 2022 invasion of his homeland. He has never given a public interview.
Voznyuk is 41 years old, born in Kharkiv, and based in Frankfurt with his wife, Strictly Come Dancing and Let’s Dance judge Motsi Mabuse. To audiences across the UK and Germany, that relationship is the starting point. The career behind it runs considerably further.
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Who Is Evgenij Voznyuk?
Evgenij Voznyuk is a Ukrainian professional dancer and choreographer who has been based in Germany since the mid-2000s. He is a former Ukrainian national Latin dance champion, a former German Latin dance champion, and a working choreographer for RTL’s Let’s Dance. Alongside Motsi Mabuse, he co-owns and manages the Motsi Mabuse Taunus-Tanzschule GmbH in Kelkheim, near Frankfurt, where his official title is Geschäftsführer, the German equivalent of Managing Director.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Born | 1984, Kharkiv, Ukraine |
| Age | 41 (as of 2026) |
| Nationality | Ukrainian |
| Profession | Dancer, choreographer, dance school Managing Director |
| Spouse | Motsi Mabuse (married 2017) |
| Children | One daughter (born August 2018) |
| Based | Frankfurt, Germany |
| Dance school | Motsi Mabuse Taunus-Tanzschule GmbH, Kelkheim |
| Languages | Ukrainian, Russian, German, English |
| @evgenij_voznyuk (63,000+ followers) |
From Kharkiv to the German Dance Circuit
Voznyuk grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. He started dancing at age ten and moved quickly through competitive Latin, the discipline that would carry him through a professional career spanning three decades.
By 1998, at fourteen years old, he had won the Ukrainian national championship in Latin American dance. In competitive dancesport, a national title is the highest domestic result available, not a regional or junior grade. Taking it at that age put him in a rare category.
He relocated to Germany in the years that followed, a move that proved decisive for everything that came next. By 2005 he was settled in Germany and had already met Motsi Mabuse, then still competing as a professional dancer herself. They would not enter a competition together for another six years.
The Full Competitive Record
The account most articles give of Voznyuk’s competitive career covers exactly one result: the 2013 German Latin Championship. The actual record runs considerably longer.
2007: Before partnering with Motsi, Voznyuk reached the final of the German National Championship in the main adult category as a solo competitor. This result alone places him among Germany’s top Latin athletes at a point when almost nobody outside the sport knew his name.
May 2011: He and Motsi entered a competition together for the first time at the British Open Championships in Blackpool, one of the most respected international stages in competitive dance.
2013: The pair won the German Latin Championship, the highest domestic title in their discipline.
2014: Both Voznyuk and Motsi retired from competitive dancing together, marking the close of their partnership on the floor of Let’s Dance, the RTL show where Motsi had already been judging since 2011. They ended that chapter on the same stage, at the same time.
His Television Work on Let’s Dance and RTL
Retirement from competition did not end Voznyuk’s involvement with RTL or with Let’s Dance.
He has worked regularly as a choreographer for the show behind the scenes, a continuing professional role that keeps him embedded in one of Germany’s biggest television franchises. In 2015, he stepped into a visible coaching position on Stepping Out, an RTL format adapted from a UK original, where he worked directly with actors Mimi Fiedler and Bernhard Bettermann on their performances.
In June 2019, he returned to the Let’s Dance screen as a performer for the special broadcast “Let’s Dance: Die große Profi-Challenge”, appearing alongside dancers Marta Arndt and Evgeny Vinokurov.
He and Motsi also produced a DVD dance course together, Dance’n’Fun, sold through the QVC teleshopping channel in Germany. It is another strand of professional work that sits almost entirely outside the British and international coverage of either of them.
Relationship With Motsi Mabuse: The Actual Timeline
Voznyuk met Motsi in Germany in 2005, six years before they competed together for the first time. The relationship built gradually across a long professional partnership before becoming public.
- 2005 — Met in Germany for the first time
- May 2011 — First competed together at Blackpool
- 2013 — Won the German Latin Championship together
- 2014 — Both retired from competition at the same time, on the Let’s Dance stage
- 2015 — Publicly confirmed as a couple, following Motsi’s divorce from her first husband, fellow dancer Timo Kulczak
- 2017 — A civil ceremony in Germany, then a wedding celebration in Mallorca, near Pollença in the north of the island, attended by close family only. Motsi took the double-barrelled name Mabuse-Voznyuk.
- August 2018 — Their daughter was born. The couple have kept her name entirely out of the public record.
- February 2023 — They renewed their vows on a beach in the Maldives, confirmed through the official Let’s Dance Germany Instagram account.
Motsi has described Voznyuk publicly as her “best friend” and said they share a “deep honesty” in their relationship.
The Dance School He Co-Manages in Kelkheim
After more than four years of planning, Voznyuk and Motsi opened the Motsi Mabuse Taunustanzschule in Eschborn in March 2018. The school launched at Düsseldorfer Straße 40 with more than 75 weekly classes, covering Latin dance, Hip Hop, Salsa, Bachata, Afro Beats, contemporary styles, competition training, and fitness courses.
In late 2021, Motsi marked the departure from Eschborn publicly on Instagram. “This week was a big farewell to Eschborn,” she wrote. “Closing chapter to a part of our life that taught us many lessons. Starting a business is always hard, and moving forward to the next chapter we know our strengths, we know our weaknesses but most of all we have each other.”
The school relocated to Kelkheim in 2022, now at Margarete-von-Wrangell-Straße 15, 65779 Kelkheim, operating as a registered company under the name Motsi Mabuse Die Taunus-Tanzschule GmbH. The business runs three separate divisions, each with its own Instagram account: the main dance school, a dedicated academy branch, and a fitness programme.
Voznyuk’s role, confirmed in his own Instagram biography, is Co-owner and Geschäftsführer. He carries legal responsibility for the company alongside Motsi.
When His Family Was Caught in Kharkiv
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 brought Voznyuk’s hometown into some of the war’s heaviest early combat. His parents were in Kharkiv when it began.
Motsi had planned to visit the city with him before the war made it impossible. She posted on Twitter: “2020 we booked our flights to spend Easter in Kharkiv. 2021 we were still on lockdown. 2022 seems I will never see the town my husband was born. He wanted to show me his motherland.”
His parents were sheltering in bunkers as the fighting spread through the city. Their neighbour’s house was destroyed. In her autobiography Finding My Own Rhythm, Motsi describes being woken at 5 a.m. by a FaceTime call from her mother-in-law: “There are bombs dropping.”
Voznyuk drove to the Ukrainian border himself to bring civilians back to Germany. Motsi confirmed this in a live appearance on ITV’s This Morning: “My husband went to the border, drove there, picked up some people, brought them back.”
His parents eventually evacuated Kharkiv and came to live with the couple in Frankfurt. “It’s a very different life now that my parents-in-law have come to live with us, possibly forever,” Motsi said. The household that had been the two of them and their daughter grew to ten people within weeks.
The couple also supported individual Ukrainian dancers affected by the conflict, raised funds through charity sales, and Motsi serves as an ambassador for Cotton Made in Africa, a cause both have backed alongside their Ukraine relief work.
Voznyuk’s parents now share the Frankfurt home with him, his wife and his daughter, a family unit that changed shape permanently in early 2022. His daughter has never been photographed publicly. He holds 63,000 followers on Instagram and has worked in European television for more than a decade, yet has never sat down for an interview. At 41, with two national championship titles across two countries, a registered company to his name and thirty years of professional dance behind him, Motsi Mabuse’s husband remains one of the most accomplished and least-heard figures in European dance.
