CELEBRITY ACTOR PRODUCER
S tarring in the hit series The Steve Harvey Show as sassy, comical Lovita Alizay Jenkins solidified for Terri J. Vaughn that she wanted more. “I always wanted to create my own show,” she says, sitting behind her desk at her Buckhead office at Nina Holiday Entertainment. “I wanted to be a boss. I was always asking the executive director to let me write an episode or something. I wanted to be involved.” After six successful seasons, the show ran its course. Given her character’s popularity, the actress expected offers to roll in. “That’s not how it worked,” says Vaughn. Vaughn, who was living in Hollywood, continued to get parts here and there while keeping an eye out for a TV series that could give her that break-out, starring role. A friend asked her to join the cast of an independent movie he was producing in Georgia, and she agreed. The last day of the shoot, Cas Sigers-Beedles, who costumed the film, ran to the trunk of her car and got copies of her debut novel A Girl Named Lily to give to the cast. “I read it on the plane,” says Vaughn. “I fell in love and thought that this could be the series I could star in.” She called Sigers-Beedles and excitedly shared her plan and invited her to stay at her place in Hollywood while they went to the meetings that her agent set up. Sigers-Beedles, a graduate in textiles from North Carolina State, was skeptical, but Vaughn’s enthusiasm was contagious. Each meeting the duo heard virtually the same thing: We love the character and the story, but that doesn’t sound Terri J. Vaughn and Cas Sigers- Beedles joined forces to create a powerhouse entertainment company fueled by laughter, friendship and a drive to tell their stories.
STRONGER
TOGETHER By Echo Mont gome r y Ga r re t t
like an African-American woman. “The problem is that people who are writing the scripts for people who look like me, aren’t people who look like me,” says Vaughn. “Here I am, telling them that this is the perfect vehicle for me and my voice, and they are telling me it doesn’t sound like me.” That set a spark for Vaughn and Sigers-Beedles, who decided to launch Nina Holiday Entertainment, devoted to creating content for the actress and her peers. The name of their company honors two trail-blazing women, who inspire the founders: Sigers-Beedles’s High Priestess of Soul Nina Simone, revered as a consummate
Terri J. Vaughn and Cas Sigers-Beedles
Photography by Prime Phocus LLC
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