Isabelle Valdéz Santana, who records simply as Isabelle, is a Dominican Christian singer born on 10 August 1981 in Pimentel, in the province of Duarte. She has been recording since 1998 and is the most nominated singer in the history of her category at the Premios Soberano.

Algodón

Her first album came out in 1998, when she was seventeen. Four more followed at long intervals — Regresará in 2005, Apóyate de Mí in 2009, El Tiempo Llegó in 2011, Tiempos de Cambio in 2019. Five albums in twenty-one years is a slow pace for a career this decorated, The gaps are part of how she works.

Nine nominations

The Premios Soberano nominated her in 2007, when they were still called the Casandra, and again in 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. She won on the ninth, taking Contemporary Religious Music in 2021 — fourteen years after the first nomination. No singer has been nominated in that category more often; Marcos Yaroide is level with her.

The awards outside the country came earlier and more easily. Costa Rica’s Premios Unción gave her best album, best singer and best song; Panama named her best singer and gave best album to Apóyate en Mí; Curaçao gave her best album and best singer. Mexico’s Premios Arpa nominated her for best album and best female singer. At home she took three statuettes at the 2018 Premios El Galardón, among them best female singer and song of the year for Por Ti Peleo Yo — written for her by Juan Carlos Rodríguez of Tercer Cielo — and the Academia Cristiana de Cronistas de Arte honoured her twenty years’ work.

The offer she turned down

In 2017 she said in a television interview that she had refused an invitation to join Camila, the Mexican pop group, because she sings only for God. Mario Domm, who leads the band, denied it publicly on Instagram. He then took the denial down: he had spoken to her, and understood that the approach had come from the group’s label rather than from the group itself.

The episode says something exact. A Dominican worship singer was close enough to the mainstream Latin pop industry to be approached by the label behind one of its largest acts, and said no — a choice the genre usually only talks about in the abstract.

Coming back

By 2019 the Dominican press was writing about her return to performing rather than her next record. Creer en Ti, a duet with the Puerto Rican Samuel Hernández, is what she came back with, and it has been heard more widely than anything else she has recorded. That same year she sang No Dejaré de Creer en Ti with Alex Zurdo.

Her collaborations map the centre of Dominican and Puerto Rican Christian music: Tercer Cielo, Redimi2, Barak, Henry García, Alex Zurdo, Samuel Hernández. She sings Que Se Abran Los Cielos with Mariela Valdez and Yamilka.

La Victoria

In 2018 she assembled Christian and secular artists for a concert called Aquí Estoy and staged it, free, inside the La Victoria prison.

When the pandemic closed the country in 2020 she ran a campaign called Código SOS — a continuous twenty-four-hour prayer, and a team that delivered food and medicine to anyone who asked through it — alongside Ayuno 7x7, seven days of fasting and prayer. She released No Me Tocará that year, and No Tengo Miedo with Sarah La Profeta.