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Alisan Porter

Alisan Porter first found a national audience remarkably early. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1981, she had been singing and performing since the age of three. At five, after a producer heard her singing in a Los Angeles hotel lobby, she appeared on Star Search and became the competition’s youngest winner at the time. Her early screen work quickly showed her range as a young performer. Porter appeared as Little Pumpkin on Pee-wee’s Playhouse and played the youngest daughter of Lynn Redgrave’s character in the 1989 ABC sitcom Chicken Soup. Her defining childhood film role arrived in 1991, when she starred opposite Jim Belushi as the title character in Curly Sue. The part made her a familiar face, with Porter carrying the film through a mix of comic confidence, musical ability and directness. Rather than following a straightforward path through Hollywood, Porter continued performing across theatre and music. At Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut, she played Anita in West Side Story and later took the lead in Cinderella. At 18, she moved to New York to audition for Broadway productions and was cast as Urleen in Footloose. She subsequently played Miriam in The Ten Commandments: The Musical and appeared on Broadway as Bebe Benzenheimer in the 2006 revival of A Chorus Line. Portions of her audition were included in the documentary Every Little Step. Music became an increasingly central part of Porter’s career. She served as vocalist and main songwriter for The Raz, formed the Alisan Porter Project and released her independent self-titled debut album in 2009. In 2016, she returned to televised competition on the tenth season of The Voice. After all four coaches turned for her blind audition performance of “Blue Bayou,” she joined Christina Aguilera’s team and ultimately won the season. It was a fitting continuation of a career that began with a child performer already equally comfortable acting, singing and commanding a stage.