Natalie Holly-Purviance is an actor, writer and filmmaker. As an actor she originated the role of Maxine in Christie Perfetti’s Carnival Girls and performed at The Kraine Theatre, Pantheon Theatre, House of Tribes Theatre, Impact Theatre, and the Strawberry-One Act Festival. As filmmaker, she Associate Produced A. Sayeeda Clarke’s short, WHITE for the inaugural ITVS Futurestates series starring Elvis Nolasco and Zabryna Guevara.

In 2012 she moved to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and later, Cap-Haitian, Haiti where she worked on various projects including a housing development community for displaced earthquake victims, which was funded by the United States Agency for International Development. During this time, she wrote and developed a television pilot which she was invited to pitch at the CaribbeanTales Incubator hosted by the Toronto International Film Festival. She was commissioned by the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago to produce an educational video on jatropha, a local - to - Haiti multi-purpose crop, which was presented at the Caribbean Science and Agriculture Film and Video Competition. She has since been a finalist in the Writers Guild of America East, Made in New York Writers Room, has written for the New York Film Academy blog, and been published by The Haitian Times and Harper’s Magazine.

Born and raised in Queens, NY to Haitian parents, Natalie studied at Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal, earned a BA in Sociology and Anthropology at Wells College, and completed her MFA at The Actors Studio Drama School in New York. She is currently Director of Development at The Actor’s Express Theatre in Atlanta where she resides with her husband Domonic and her dog, Bella.

Dr. Brandon Byrd is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century black intellectual and social history, with a special focus on black internationalism. His book, The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), recovers a crucial and overlooked chapter of black internationalism and political thought by exploring the ambivalent attitudes that black intellectuals in the post-Civil War era held toward Haiti.

Dr. Byrd’s scholarship has appeared in journals such as The Journal of African American History, The Journal of Civil War Era, Slavery and Abolition, and The Journal of Haitian Studies, and in popular outlets, including The Washington Post. Support for his research has come from numerous institutions and organizations including Vanderbilt University, Marquette University, the American Philosophical Society, the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at UMass-Amherst, the Marcus Garvey Foundation, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

In addition to his research and teaching, Dr. Byrd is a co-editor of the Black Lives and Liberation series published by Vanderbilt University Press.

A native of North Carolina, Dr. Byrd earned his BA from Davidson College, an MA in History from the College of William & Mary, and a PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives with his family in Nashville, where he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University.