Vivoree Esclito Family & the Story Nobody Talks About

Marta Alizeh

December 17, 2025

vivoree biography

Full name: Maria Vivoree Niña Matutes Esclito Born: August 3, 2000 Loon, Bohol, Philippines Nickname (off-camera): Niña Father: Jun Esclito — seafarer, from Davao Oriental Mother: Tetchie Esclito — public elementary school teacher Siblings: Celestine Niño (brother, known as CN) and Niña Angela (sister) Profession: Actress, singer, content creator, model Management: Star Magic / Rise Artists Studio (ABS-CBN) Relationship status: In a relationship with hiker Trei Altarejos (confirmed November 2025)

Here is the detail almost every article about Vivoree Esclito leaves out.

She was born at seven months. Premature, fragile, with odds stacked against her from the very first breath. A doctor told her mother she was unlikely to survive. Her parents, a schoolteacher and a seafarer from a small municipality on an island in the Visayas, held onto hope anyway. And when she made it — when she pulled through against what they’d been told — they named her after the very thing she had already proven herself to be.

The name Vivoree comes from the English word survivor. She has been living up to it ever since.

The Story Behind Her Name

Most people who follow Vivoree know her as the bubbly, Bisaya-proud actress from Bohol. The one with the effortless stage presence and the laugh that fills a room. What they often don’t know is that she was never supposed to be here.

Born prematurely at seven months in Loon, Bohol, the doctors were not encouraging. A medical professional told her mother Tetchie that the baby’s chances of survival were slim. Tetchie and Jun Esclito — a schoolteacher and a seaman, people who were used to waiting and hoping — chose to believe otherwise.

Their daughter survived.

They named her Vivoree, derived from the word survivore — a deliberate homage to the fight she had already won before she could even open her eyes properly. In Filipino showbiz circles and fan discussions, her name is often treated as just a distinctive stage name. It isn’t. It is a declaration made by two parents who refused to accept a bad prognosis.

She was also given the name Niña — the name her family and close friends use to this day. The world calls her Vivoree. The people who know her best call her Niña.


Who Are Vivoree Esclito’s Parents?

Jun Esclito — the seafarer father

Jun Esclito is a seafarer originally from Davao Oriental, on the eastern coast of Mindanao. The family lived briefly in Davao when Vivoree was a child before moving back to Bohol, where she would grow up and eventually attend school.

The life of a seafarer’s family is a particular kind of life — long absences, limited communication, a father who is always somewhere on the water while home continues without him. Jun was present in his daughter’s early years, but the rhythms of his profession meant that the household was largely shaped by Tetchie. Vivoree has spoken warmly about her father in interviews without dwelling on the specifics of his career; what comes through is the sense of a family that stayed tightly connected despite the distances involved.

He and Tetchie raised three children in circumstances that were ordinary and hardworking — not wealthy, not struggling in any dramatic sense, but rooted in the kind of practical, community-facing life that produces quietly determined people.

Tetchie Esclito — the teacher who raised a performer

Tetchie Esclito is a public elementary school teacher. She taught in the local school system in Bohol — the same system that her daughter would eventually pass through as an honour student. There’s something quietly poetic about that: a mother who taught other people’s children all day, and came home to raise one who would become one of the Philippines’ more visible young performers.

Tetchie is the parent who was there, consistently, for the practical building blocks of Vivoree’s early years. She was the one who heard about her daughter’s bullying. She was the one Vivoree leaned on before Pinoy Big Brother, before Star Magic, before any of it. In a 2022 ABS-CBN feature, Vivoree described her childhood confidence-building as a long process — and the foundation of that process was the home Tetchie built.

She raised her eldest daughter as an honour student. That matters. The confidence Vivoree performs on camera is not something that appeared on Day One of Pinoy Big Brother. It was accumulated over years of being told — at school, at home — that she was capable.


Vivoree’s Siblings: CN and Niña Angela

Vivoree is the eldest of three children. Her younger brother, Celestine Niño — known everywhere as CN — and her younger sister, Niña Angela, make up the Esclito siblings.

CN has appeared at public events and has been part of fan discussions over the years, though he maintains a private life away from the entertainment industry. Niña Angela, the youngest, is significantly younger than Vivoree and has appeared occasionally on social media, where Vivoree has shared family moments without making a spectacle of their lives.

The sibling dynamic is warmly present in how Vivoree talks about home. She does not treat her family as a brand extension or a content angle. They are just her family — the people she grew up with in Bohol before Manila came calling.

It is worth noting that the name Niña Angela, her younger sister’s name, shares the “Niña” that is also Vivoree’s private nickname. It is one of those small, affectionate overlaps that families create without thinking about it too hard.


Growing Up in Bohol: Bullied, Quietly Brilliant

Bohol is a beautiful province — known for the Chocolate Hills, the tarsiers, the colonial-era churches, the sea. Loon, where Vivoree was born, is a coastal municipality on the western shore. The family later settled in the Tagbilaran area, where she attended Tagbilaran City Science High School.

She was an honour student. That detail gets skipped in most profiles in favour of the more dramatic parts of her story, but it matters. The academic discipline, the habit of showing up, the ability to be underestimated and still outperform — these are not unrelated to the performer she became.

What she has been most open about from her school years is the bullying.

Vivoree has excessive body hair — a condition she has spoken about publicly and with remarkable directness. As a child and teenager, she was mocked for it. Classmates compared her to animals. She has described the experience plainly: “Kino-compare nila ako sa mga hayop. It wasn’t easy talaga. Sobrang hirap talaga siya mentally, emotionally.” The words translate roughly: they compared me to animals. It genuinely was not easy. It was mentally and emotionally very hard.

She didn’t hide from it or quietly move on. She talked about it. She talked about it on television, in interviews, in ABS-CBN features. And when a host on the noontime show It’s Showtime made fun of her body hair on national television in 2021, she responded with clarity rather than silence: “Don’t you dare make me feel ashamed of my body.” Her fans mobilised immediately; the clip went viral; and the incident became one of the more visible moments of a performer publicly refusing to accept the premise that her body was an acceptable punchline.

The girl who was bullied in Bohol became the woman who called out body-shaming on national TV. That is a coherent story, even if it took years to tell.


Pinoy Big Brother Lucky 7: How Bohol Sent Her to Manila

In June 2016, Vivoree Esclito was a Grade 10 student in Bohol. She auditioned for Pinoy Big Brother: Lucky 7 and was accepted as one of the teen housemates. She was 16 years old, describing herself in her intro as confident, passionate about singing, dancing, acting, and sport.

Her motto going in: “Life is bittersweet.” Her answer to why she should win: “Because I know that I possess some things that people expect from a teenager nowadays.” She named confidence and responsibility. She wasn’t wrong.

Inside the house, she earned the nickname that stuck the Go Getter Girl ng Bohol. She advanced to the Teen Big 6 before being evicted on Day 101. She did not win. The winner that season was Maymay Entrata.

But Vivoree’s eviction was not a defeat in any lasting sense. She had entered the house as an unknown student from a Visayan island. She left it as a face the Philippine entertainment industry had taken note of. Star Magic signed her. Rise Artists Studio the talent management arm set up by ABS-CBN Films in collaboration with Star Magic — made her one of its pioneer artists in February 2020.

The Big Brother house was not where her career ended. It was where it started.


The Acting Career — From Teen Drama to Netflix

The trajectory after PBB has been steadier and more varied than most people realise.

Her first notable post-PBB credit was the teen drama He’s Into Her, where she played Ysay a role that introduced her to a wider daytime TV audience and gave her space to develop beyond the reality show version of herself. It worked.

What followed was a career built on showing range without abandoning her core audience:

The Killer Bride (2019): a prime-time supernatural drama that gave her a more adult, primetime slot and a broader viewership.

Hello Stranger (2020–2021): a boys’ love (BL) romantic comedy series, the film adaptation of which earned her a specific shoutout from entertainment writer Jason Tan Liwag of Rappler, who named her a standout performer.

Huwag Kang Mangamba: another ABS-CBN series that deepened her TV presence.

Tara, G! (2022): a coming-of-age iWantTFC series in which she played the bubbly Jengjeng, a role that mirrored and also gently complicated her own public image. The ABS-CBN feature tied to the show became the vehicle for her most detailed public discussion of her childhood bullying.

The Iron Heart (2022): her role as Penelope Sta. Maria earned genuine critical recognition. In 2025, an essay in the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Young Blood column specifically praised her portrayal of Penelope for providing positive Visayan representation on mainstream television noting her morena skin and flawless Bisaya dialogue delivered by a performer whose mother tongue is Cebuano. That is not a generic compliment. It is a specific, meaningful one.

Can’t Buy Me Love (2023): another ABS-CBN romantic series that added to her portfolio.

Tabing Ilog: The Musical (2023 and 2024): a stage production in which she alternated in the lead role of Eds, alongside Akira Morishita. Theater critics offered mixed reviews of the production overall but noted the genuine chemistry she and Morishita brought to their pairing.

One Hit Wonder (2025) — a Netflix production in which she played Lyn-Lyn in a supporting role. The film received mixed responses — an IMDb user rating of 4.8, with praise for its nostalgic ’90s OPM atmosphere and criticism of underwritten plotting.

Ghosting (2025) — another project that kept her visible in a busy year.

Wish Date: Love Tales (August 2025) — perhaps her most distinctive 2025 credit. She starred as Bianca Gonzales in this cinematic concert, a hybrid short film and live musical performance. She became the first Wish Date actor to also perform live at the event, singing an original track called “My Heart Promises.” It was exactly the kind of project that a performer with both acting and music credentials could own in a way that a pure actor could not.


The Music: Writing Her Own Story, Literally

Vivoree’s music career does not get the coverage it deserves, partly because the acting work is more visible and partly because she builds her catalogue slowly, on her own terms.

Her debut single “Kaya Pa” was released in November 2016 — weeks after her PBB eviction — and written by her. The song landed with her fanbase (known as Greener) and set the tone for the kind of artist she wanted to be: someone who writes about her own experience rather than performing someone else’s material.

Since then she has released music consistently:

  • “Matapang” (2023): a track that reflected the confidence she had been building publicly for years
  • “Dalawang Isip” (2023): for which she wrote the music video script, which doubled as a short film, and co-directed alongside filmmaker Karlo Calingao
  • Three singles in 2024, culminating in her first solo mini-album, Movie Made for Me, released alongside a new single of the same name. The project marked a clear step up in ambition: a cohesive body of work rather than a collection of individual releases.

Her YouTube channel, where she shares song covers and lifestyle content has approximately 789,000 subscribers as of late 2025. She earned the YouTube Silver Creator Award after crossing 100,000 subscribers. Her cover of “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” with collaborator JC Alcantara is among her most viewed performances.

The through-line across all of it is creative control. She writes. She scripts. She co-directs. For someone who entered the industry through a reality show at 16, that level of creative involvement nine years later is not a given it’s a choice she has actively made.


Body Shaming, Confidence, and Standing Her Ground

It would be easy to write this section as a triumphant redemption arc bullied kid becomes confident star, end of story. But the reality is messier and more honest than that.

Vivoree’s excessive body hair has followed her from Bohol schoolrooms to national television. As a child, classmates compared her to animals. The psychological toll of that was real and she has said so directly. Confidence was not something she was born with; it was something she constructed over years, with effort.

In 2019, she attended the ABS-CBN Ball in an unfinished sparkly red gown by designer Dominique Dy. The gown was not ready in time; the seams showed; social media noticed and commented. She stood there anyway. By the 2023 ABS-CBN Ball, she arrived in a custom black see-through Lauren Vito gown, prepared early, polished, clearly someone who had done the work between one red carpet and the next.

In February 2021, a It’s Showtime host made fun of her body hair on camera during a segment. She responded on social media the same day — not with apology, not with deflection, but with the line: “Don’t you dare make me feel ashamed of my body.” She also retweeted a user who called out the host directly: “You can joke all you want, laugh all you want but NEVER EVER use someone’s insecurities as your JOKE on NATIONAL TV.”

Her fans backed her. The clip went viral. The backlash against the host was significant.

In a 2024 appearance on Tonight with Boy Abunda, she discussed having moved past the perception of herself as perpetually young and reserved. She credited her career experiences the roles, the projects, the public moments with giving her the tools to stand more firmly in who she is.


Relationship: Trei Altarejos and the “Hard Launch”

Vivoree Esclito confirmed her relationship with Trei Altarejos on November 1, 2025. Altarejos is a hiker someone entirely outside the Philippine entertainment industry, which in itself was a notable detail for a fanbase accustomed to discussing celebrity-to-celebrity relationships.

The “hard launch” the deliberate, public confirmation of a relationship generated significant attention on social media. The couple was photographed together at public events, including a political rally, and TikTok content about their appearances together accumulated quickly.

Before Trei, Vivoree dated a man from outside showbiz in 2022, briefly. That relationship also stayed mostly private. Her pattern has consistently been to keep her romantic life grounded outside the industry a deliberate choice for someone who lives so much of her professional life in public.

She is not in the habit of discussing past relationships in detail, and her fanbase has largely respected that boundary while still paying close attention to her current one.


The Typhoon Odette Fundraiser: When Home Was in Crisis

In December 2021, Typhoon Odette (internationally known as Typhoon Rai) devastated Bohol province. The province Vivoree grew up in — the one she still calls home, the one she represents every time she does a Bisaya line on screen — was hit hard. Water, food, and basic supplies were severely limited. Her relatives and community members were directly affected.

In early 2022, Vivoree launched a fundraising campaign. It was not a celebrity tweet-and-forget moment. She coordinated with fans, friends, and donors, managed the logistics of getting goods to affected areas despite limited signal connectivity in parts of the island, and delivered supplies to people who needed them.

She said afterwards: “I’m just glad I have supportive fans na sinuportahan ako sa donation drive” — roughly, I’m glad I have fans who supported me in the donation drive. She also urged continued support beyond the initial relief phase, making the point that the immediate crisis was not the end of the community’s needs.

It is the kind of moment that tells you something real about a person. She didn’t just post about it. She organised.


Vivoree Esclito Net Worth and Career Earnings

Vivoree Esclito’s estimated net worth as of 2025 is approximately $1 million — drawn from nine years of continuous work across television, film, stage, music, brand endorsements, commercial modelling, and digital content creation.

The range reported by different outlets varies widely. The more sober estimates, grounded in what is publicly known about Star Magic talent earnings, ABS-CBN project fees, and the Philippine entertainment market, sit around the $1 million mark. Outlier estimates of $200,000–$300,000 undervalue a decade of consistent work; claims of $2–5 million are not supported by available information.

Her income streams include:

  • Television drama roles on ABS-CBN and streaming platforms
  • Film projects including the 2025 Netflix release One Hit Wonder
  • Music releases and streaming royalties
  • Brand endorsements and commercial modelling, she has walked for Bench Fashion Week, appeared on magazine covers (including Village Pipol), and partnered with multiple commercial brands
  • YouTube channel revenue from approximately 789,000 subscribers
  • Stage production fees from Tabing Ilog: The Musical

She does not live extravagantly in public. Her social media presence shows fashion, travel, and family — the lifestyle of a working actress in her mid-20s who has been in the industry for nearly a decade, not the lifestyle of a celebrity performing wealth.


Key Facts at a Glance

DetailInformation
Full nameMaria Vivoree Niña Matutes Esclito
BornAugust 3, 2000
BirthplaceLoon, Bohol, Philippines
Private nicknameNiña
FatherJun Esclito (seafarer, from Davao Oriental)
MotherTetchie Esclito (public elementary school teacher)
SiblingsCelestine Niño “CN” (brother); Niña Angela (sister)
NationalityFilipino
EthnicityVisayan / Filipino
Mother tongueCebuano (Bisaya)
Height5 ft 3 in (160 cm)
ManagementStar Magic / Rise Artists Studio
Relationship statusIn a relationship with Trei Altarejos (confirmed Nov 2025)
Name meaningDerived from the English word “survivor” — she was born prematurely at 7 months
Debut“Kaya Pa” single, November 2016
Estimated net worth~$1 million (2025)

Frequently Asked Questions About Vivoree Esclito

What does the name Vivoree mean? The name Vivoree comes from the English word “survivor.” Vivoree was born prematurely at seven months, and a doctor told her mother she was unlikely to survive. When she did, her parents named her after what she had already proven herself to be. Her close friends and family actually call her by her other given name, Niña.

When and where was Vivoree Esclito born? She was born on August 3, 2000, in Loon, Bohol, Philippines. Several articles incorrectly state February 23 as her birthday or list Tacloban City as her birthplace — both are wrong. Loon is a coastal municipality in Bohol, and she grew up in the Tagbilaran area.

Who are Vivoree Esclito’s parents? Her father is Jun Esclito, a seafarer from Davao Oriental. Her mother is Tetchie Esclito, a public elementary school teacher in Bohol. The family lived briefly in Davao before returning to Bohol.

Does Vivoree Esclito have siblings? Yes. She is the eldest of three siblings. Her younger brother is Celestine Niño, known as CN. Her younger sister is Niña Angela. Both are kept relatively private and away from the entertainment spotlight.

How did Vivoree Esclito become famous? She joined Pinoy Big Brother: Lucky 7 in 2016 as a 16-year-old Grade 10 student from Bohol. She earned the nickname “Go Getter Girl ng Bohol,” advanced to the Teen Big 6, and was evicted on Day 101. Despite not winning, her time on the show led directly to her signing with Star Magic and the start of her acting and music career.

What has Vivoree Esclito been in? Her television credits include He’s Into Her, The Killer Bride, Huwag Kang Mangamba, Hello Stranger, Tara G!, The Iron Heart, and Can’t Buy Me Love. In theater, she appeared in Tabing Ilog: The Musical (2023–2024). Her film work includes Hello Stranger: The Movie and the 2025 Netflix production One Hit Wonder. In 2025, she also starred in Wish Date: Love Tales and the series Ghosting.

Is Vivoree Esclito in a relationship? Yes. She confirmed her relationship with hiker Trei Altarejos on November 1, 2025. Altarejos is not a member of the entertainment industry. Before this, she dated someone outside showbiz in 2022. She tends to keep her personal life private until she’s ready to make things public.

Why did Vivoree Esclito speak out about body shaming? Vivoree has excessive body hair and was bullied about it as a child — classmates compared her to animals, a fact she has discussed openly. In February 2021, an It’s Showtime host made fun of her body hair on national television. She responded publicly the same day, saying “Don’t you dare make me feel ashamed of my body,” and called on others not to normalise body shaming on national platforms. She has been a consistent voice on body positivity and mental health throughout her career.

What is Vivoree Esclito’s net worth in 2025? Her estimated net worth is approximately $1 million, earned through nearly a decade of television and film work, music releases, brand endorsements, commercial modelling, stage productions, and YouTube content creation. Her YouTube channel has approximately 789,000 subscribers as of late 2025.

Does Vivoree Esclito write her own music? Yes. Her debut single “Kaya Pa” (2016) was self-written, as was her 2023 single “Dalawang Isip,” for which she also wrote the music video script and co-directed the video. In 2024, she released her first solo mini-album, Movie Made for Me. Creative control over her music has been a consistent thread throughout her career.

What language does Vivoree Esclito speak? Her mother tongue is Cebuano (Bisaya), the regional language of the Visayas. She is also fluent in Tagalog and English. Her Bisaya lines in The Iron Heart were specifically praised in a 2025 Philippine Daily Inquirer essay for their authenticity and quality — written by a critic who highlighted her Visayan identity as a meaningful form of representation on mainstream Philippine television.


Last updated: May 2026. Sources include Wikipedia, PEP.ph, ABS-CBN official features, Grokipedia, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Rappler, Big Brother Wiki, and Asian Drama Wiki Fandom.

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