Natali Husic
Class of 2025
Natali was born in the small village of Bar, in what used to be known as Yugoslavia. However, she did not grow up there. At only a few months old, her parents decided to leave their war-torn country for another, Zaire, today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She was at that time one of the only foreign babies in the capital of Kinshasa.
In Kinshasa, she spoke Serbo-Croatian at home, but she was educated in a French school.
Most of her life was spent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A few times with her family they had to flee the country, mostly when lootings specifically targeting foreigners occurred. The situation was particularly bad in 1997 when she had to move to Belgium for a year where she studied in a religious school.
At fourteen, again due to lootings, she was forced to leave once more to continue her studies in France where her sister was already studying at university. She finished her primary studies there and earned her baccalaureate in Science and Economics.
Her dream has always been to discover the United States, and at the age of seventeen, she decided to go on her own to New York. In NY, she took English lessons at Kaplan School and then pursued one of her passions: theater and the piano at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute and the New York Film Academy. Art has remained a big part of her life. Born of a pianist mother, she has been playing the piano since the age of four.
However, growing up, she realized that it was only a passion and not a vocation. She then decided to undertake studies in hospitality management and graduated from the Institute of Culinary Education in New York before working in Dubai for the Bulldozer and Cipriani group. But once again, she realized that she had difficulties imagining her life in this field and that something was missing in her daily life.
She resumed her studies at New York University where she earned a BA in International Relations. Those few years were eye-opening for several reasons. Not only did she finally feel in her place but on top of that she found herself immersed in a universe that explained to her where she came from and what she could realize in the future. During these university years, she never stopped working by doing internships in think tanks or by working and helping her mother and her non-profit organization for children in Kinshasa.
Today Natali lives in Washington DC with her husband. The latter worked at the French Embassy, hence the reason why they live here. After graduating from NYU, Natali started a position within the company Richard Attias and Associates as Project Coordinator. She works particularly with the events of the Future Investment Initiative based in Saudi Arabia.