Yana Gupta was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) on 23 April 1979 to a Czech father and an Indian mother and began modelling in the mid-1990s. Her career took a turn towards the east when she married Indian artist Satyakam Gupta in Pune. and changed her last name from Synkova to Gupta. She divorced Gupta in 2005. In 2008 she altered her given name to Yaana.
