Olive Talley is an award-winning producer, director and writer. She is driven to make a difference by telling stories that matter. Olive is a veteran journalist in television, print, radio and online media, but feels her strength is long form, in-depth storytelling. She honed her video production skills in network television as a staff producer for primetime news magazine shows, Prime Time Live! at ABC and Dateline NBC in NY.
She is a two-time national Emmy finalist for work at both networks and winner of a National Headliner for Outstanding Network Documentary and a DuPont Columbia Award as part of a news team at NBC, among many prestigious journalism awards throughout her career. Her reporting at the Houston Post, Houston Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News garnered a George Polk Award and recognition as a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for an investigation of the medical treatment of federal prison inmates. At United Press International, she covered the space program and Texas’ Death Row. She’s thankful for the traditional journalism values she learned in the early days of her career as a radio reporter in Austin, San Antonio and Houston. Olive is proud to be a past board member of the non-profit Investigative Reporters & Editors at the University of Missouri. Olive holds a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and attended Harvard University on a Nieman Fellowship.
Olive’s relationship with Dr. Karyn Purvis dates to 2001, when Olive was working on a documentary for Dateline about a Texas family who had taken part in a summer research camp, The Hope Connection, created by Dr. Purvis and Dr. David Cross. After Olive left the network and became a freelance producer, she worked closely with Drs. Purvis and Cross to conceptualize and create more than 60 hours of video training materials for the Institute of Child Development, renamed in honor of Dr. Purvis after her death in 2016. Olive considers her work on behalf of vulnerable and traumatized children to be among the most important and impactful work of her life.