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Kathleen Herles
This 13-year-old hardworking professional gives voice to Dora, the explorer
By Eunice Sigler
She is the spirit and voice of Dora, that spunky, adventurous 7-year-old who has given Hispanic children someone they can relate to on the hit Nick Jr. series, Dora the Explorer.
Kathleen Herles, born in New York of Peruvian parents, is only 13, but she is as hardworking as any seasoned adult performer, say executives at Nick Jr., the preschool programming arm of the Nickelodeon television network.
“Kathleen is totally professional,” says Brown Johnson, executive vice president of Nick Jr.
It’s probably because she is no stranger to the performing arts. Kathleen loves to sing and dance and has studied ballet, tap, jazz, drama and, of course, voice. She is now taking piano lessons.
Kathleen also has landed roles on Sesame Street and in many commercials, including voiceovers for Safeguard, L’Oreal and the Census 2000.
The story of how she became the voice of Dora goes something like this: When she was four, mom Noemí Herles enrolled her in a modeling school in Manhattan. For the next two years, she competed in pageants until one of the judges, Shirley Grant, decided Kathleen was so special that she became her manager and put her in touch with producers at Nick Jr., who, in September of 1997, were auditioning for the voice of Dora. They handed her a script to read, then another.
“I just read it. I had a very high-pitched voice because I was young. I just read it normally,” she says.
Kathleen’s “normal” so perfectly captured Dora’s energy, sweet disposition and love for adventure, producers say, that they picked her out of hundreds of children who read for the part.
“We were on our way to go see my grandma, and on our way there they called to say I got the part,” Kathleen recalls. “We just couldn’t believe it—my mom had to stop the car and we were all screaming and everything.”
The next day, she was playing Dora’s voice for the pilot show.
The character Dora was not always a little girl. At first, the program’s creators envisioned a bunny as the star of the show. But Johnson had recently attended a conference in which she was made aware that Latinos were rarely lead characters on children’s TV. So she asked Dora’s creators to consider making the lead a Latina girl. “Thus Dora was born.”
“I love being Dora,” says Kathleen, proudly—“especially because she’s bilingual and speaks Spanish.”
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