Leslie Grace, the bachata princess who had to act before she could write her own songs

Leslie Grace

Photo: Tony Dandrades / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 7, 1995 The Bronx, New York City, United States
Occupation	Singer and actress
Known for	In the Heights, The Thicket
Awards	Premio Lo Nuestro · Nickelodeon Mexico Kids' Choice

For most of her career Leslie Grace has done her best work inside other people’s material. The bachata that made her name as a teenager was a bilingual reworking of a Shirelles standard, and the part that turned her into a film star, Nina Rosario in In the Heights, came from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pen. Her most talked-about role belongs to a film no audience has been allowed to see. Now the Dominican-American singer has put out Amor, Quién Eres?, a 14-track record she describes as a self-portrait, and she concedes that most of the people who know her name know it from a screen. The album is her attempt to make them hear the singer who came first.

Grace grew up between two languages and two record collections. She was born in the Bronx on January 7, 1995, the youngest of seven children of parents from La Romana and from Mao, in Valverde province, and was raised in Davie, Florida, where her mother ran hair salons. At home, she told ¡Hola! Américas, a merengue by Sergio Vargas could follow Destiny’s Child or Britney Spears without anybody remarking on it, and her father walked her through the Dominican songwriters of his generation. In middle school she recorded a Christian album, Pasión, which she sold independently through CD Baby. Once her career took off, her mother closed her salon to go on the road with her.

The door opened with a cover. Will U Still Love Me Tomorrow, her bachata take on the 1961 Shirelles hit, sung in English and Spanish, went to number one on Billboard’s Tropical Airplay chart in 2012, and Billboard reported that she had become the youngest woman to top its Latin Airplay chart. Sergio George produced the self-titled album that followed in 2013, Leslie Grace, which reached the top five of Top Latin Albums and earned a Latin Grammy nomination for best contemporary tropical album. Fans started calling her la Princesa de la Bachata, a title she still wears with pride because, as she points out, bachata was then a genre run almost entirely by men.

What came next was a decade of singles and guest spots rather than albums. The EP Lloviendo Estrellas brought two more Latin Grammy nominations in 2015, one of them for the song Como Duele el Silencio, and Premio Lo Nuestro named her tropical female artist of the year in 2016. She cut Aire with Maluma, joined Wisin, Frankie J and the duo Play-N-Skillz on a reggaeton reworking of Selena’s Si Una Vez, and crossed into K-pop on Super Junior’s Lo Siento, released through S.M. Entertainment in 2018. That same year Duro y Suave, recorded with the Puerto Rican rapper Noriel, went double platinum on the RIAA’s Latin scale.

Hollywood found her in Washington Heights. Jon M. Chu cast her as Nina, the neighborhood’s pride who comes home from Stanford carrying a secret, in his 2021 film of Miranda’s musical, released in cinemas and on HBO Max on the same day; IndieWire’s David Ehrlich wrote that she “shined.” Weeks later Warner Bros. made her Barbara Gordon in Batgirl, and she spent seven months shooting in Scotland. In August 2022, with the film close to finished, Warner Bros. Discovery shelved it, a $90 million project the studio said it was dropping as part of a “strategic shift” for DC and HBO Max, adding that the decision was “not a reflection of her performance.” Grace thanked cast, crew and fans on Instagram and signed off: “Batgirl for life!”

The screen also brought the hardest questions she has faced. When Felice León of The Root asked the cast of In the Heights why a film set in a largely Dominican neighborhood gave so few leading roles to dark-skinned Afro-Latinos, Grace was the one who did not deflect: she said she hoped the film was “cracking that glass ceiling” so that she could see “my brothers and sisters that are darker than me lead these movies.” Miranda later apologized, writing that “we fell short.” The music holds a quieter contradiction: her biggest records were covers or features, and she now says so plainly. Because she started so young, she told Billboard Español, “I never really had a chance to create — it was [mostly] versions of other songs.” The artist crowned a princess of bachata went thirteen years without releasing another album.

The acting kept coming, and by her account it changed her records. She appeared in Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s In the Summers, which won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2024, and in Elliott Lester’s western The Thicket. Working with Miranda and Chu, she told Billboard, showed her how she wanted collaboration in music to feel: “It was almost like an initiation for me.” Ayayay, released in 2025, was her first new song in three years, and Inmerecido, a bilingual song about walking out of a toxic relationship built on R&B and Afrobeat, set up the album.

Amor, Quién Eres? arrived on May 1, 2026, on Sony Music Latin. It opens with a bachata title track, because, she told EFE, that is the sound she started with and the sound of her country, then moves through the merengue-reggaeton fusion of Tú Supiste? with the duo Martox, cha-cha-chá, boleros and ballads. Every song comes with a music video, the pieces meant to add up to a short film. What music gives her that acting cannot, she said, is a story she writes herself instead of following someone else’s script.

The screen has not let go of her. In March 2026 she took two films to SXSW: Stages, Ryan Booth’s Live Nation project about two mid-career musicians forced to start over on the road, and Jonás Cuarón’s Campeón Gabacho, adapted from Aura Xilonen’s novel, in which she plays Aireen, the young woman a Mexican migrant boxer falls for in New York, opposite Rubén Blades and Eddie Marsan. Cuarón’s film opened the Morelia International Film Festival in October 2026 and reaches Cinépolis screens in Mexico on October 29. She is also in the cast of an untitled Onyx Collective pilot for Hulu, a real estate drama led by Edgar Ramírez, as Val Alonso-Rivera, an architect married to Jacob Scipio’s developer, and is attached to Propel, Felipe Vargas’s survival thriller about a commercial diver swallowed by a sperm whale.

Asked who she would most like to record with next, she names Juan Luis Guerra, the songwriter at the heart of the Dominican records her father played her, and calls it her sueño campesino. For an artist Hollywood keeps casting in other people’s stories, the choice is telling: she wants to sing with the man who wrote the songs she grew up on.