Katherine Moner is the mother of Isabela Moner, professionally known as Isabela Merced is an actress and singer from the United States. She voiced Kate in Nickelodeon's animated spinoff series Dora and Friends: Into the City! (2014–2019) and played CJ Martin on the Nickelodeon television series 100 Things to Do Before High School (2014–2016).
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Family
Katherine is a Peruvian woman from the city of Lima. She met and married a man from Louisiana named Patrick Moner. With her American husband, she gave birth to a mixed family. Katherine's talented daughter, Isabela Moner, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 10, 2001. She is the middle sibling of her family. Her sibling Giovanni is younger, and Jared is older than her. She had her Broadway debut at just ten years old in a stage production of Evita.
Daughter's Career
Merced has stated that she has wanted to be an actress since she was a child, having been influenced by films starring Shirley Temple and Judy Garland and having started in local community theater at the age of six. At the age of ten, Merced made her Broadway debut in a rendition of Evita, in which she sang in Spanish with Ricky Martin. In September 2015, she released the album Stopping Time, which Broadway Records produced.
From 2014 to 2016, Merced starred as CJ Martin, the protagonist character on the Nickelodeon television series 100 Things to Do Before High School. She started giving the voice of Kate, one of the main characters in the Dora the Explorer spinoff Dora and Friends: Into the City!, in the same year, a position she played from 2014 to 2017.
She played Lori Collins in the Nickelodeon Original Movie Splitting Adam in 2015, and she was cast as Sadie in the Nickelodeon Original Movie Legends of the Hidden Temple in 2016. Merced was cast in the film Transformers: The Last Knight in May 2016, and the film was released in June 2017. On August 11, 2017, she voiced Heather in the animated film The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature, released in theaters.
In 2018, Merced starred in Sicario: Day of the Soldado, in which she played the daughter of a criminal gang boss.
She also composed and sung the song "I'll Stay" for the comedy film Instant Family, in which she played Lizzy, the adoptive daughter of Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne's characters.
Dora and the Lost City of Gold, a live-action film adaption of the cartoon series starring Merced as the main heroine in 2019, appeared in the Christmas romantic comedy film Let It, Snow. She was cast opposite Jason Momoa in Netflix's upcoming feature Sweet Girl the same year.
On her Instagram account on October 14, 2019, Merced announced that she has decided to alter her stage name to Isabela Merced in honor of her late grandmother, whom she never met.
Merced later clarified that she had not legally changed her name and that it was "simply a stage name with a deeper connotation," as she put it. On October 25, 2019, she released her first single, "Papi," followed by her first music video on November 6, 2019. Merced published her debut EP, The Better Half of Me, on May 22, 2020, and in July 2020, she was selected one of Billboard's top 15 new Peruvian musicians to listen to.
Last Modified: Aug 26, 2021
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