Evaluna Montaner

By age four, she was already dodging tripods and high-voltage cables on her father's shoots in Caracas. The youngest daughter of Ricardo Montaner and director Marlene Rodríguez, Evaluna Montaner breathed in the smell of the set from the cradle. The stage was never a chosen destiny but an unavoidable habitat.

Nobody improvises with that last name.

In 2011, she joined Nickelodeon's studio with Grachi, a teen telenovela filmed in Miami, where she played Melanie Esquivel over two seasons. The shoot was run like a military operation. Twelve-hour days were filled with choreography, retakes and repeated lines that sharpened her on-camera rhythm and body language.

Studio School and Her Hollywood Baptism

In 2015, her American break came with the comedy ¡Pisándonos los tacones!, directed by Anne Fletcher. She shared the shoot with Sofía Vergara and Reese Witherspoon, playing a teenager at a full-blown quinceañera party. The film grossed more than $51 million at the worldwide box office and taught her how the machinery of a major Los Angeles studio works.

But her real acting laboratory came four years later. In 2019, she landed the lead role in Club 57, a co-production between Nickelodeon and the Italian company Rainbow, shot in the streets of Puglia and on soundstages in Miami. She played Eva García across 120 episodes over two seasons.

So she took on the physical demands of a daily production with time travel, live-recorded songs and complex dance sequences. The shoot for the second season moved to Bogotá in 2020 under strict health protocols. The series wrapped its international broadcast in October 2021.

Teen television had already become too small for her.

The Leap to the Director's Chair

She learned behind the camera by watching her mother, a director of dozens of music videos in Latin America. In 2020, she decided to take on the technical side and made her directing debut on the audiovisual piece for Titanic, a collaboration between Kany García and Camilo. Her visual approach favored clean long takes and a contained framing.

That same year, she directed the music video for Vida de rico, shot with lightweight optics and a warm palette that earned more than 500 million views on digital platforms. She understood the language of short-form video without relying on flashy editing tricks. She then went on to shoot Ropa cara and Machu Picchu in 2021, overseeing everything from production design to background casting.

In 2021, she also tried animated voice-over work on Koati, a film produced by Sofía Vergara, in which she voiced the character Xochi. She had to shape a neutral Mexican accent under director Rodrigo Pérez-Castro. It was three weeks of studio work in front of a condenser microphone with no final visuals to lean on.

Facts Straight and Production Codes

In 2022, cameras moved into her own home with the premiere of the documentary series Los Montaner on Disney+. The project exposed the private life of a family used to negotiating broadcast rights and international distribution deals with corporate coolness, generating fifteen hours of raw footage a day that took weeks to edit.

And the commercial move paid off.

In 2024, she coordinated the audiovisual production of the promotional singles from the album Cuatro, shot in Miami with a crew of fifteen. The camera budget was covered in three sixteen-hour days using Arri Master Prime fixed lenses mounted on an Arri Alexa Mini LF sensor.