Kendell Byrd

Kendell Byrd’s Path From Tech to the Booth

Few careers in voice acting begin at a software engineering internship at Facebook, but Kendell Byrd’s trajectory has never followed a straight line. Growing up in Flossmoor, Illinois – a south suburb of Chicago – she cultivated three simultaneous passions: science and technology, theater, and animation. That triad would eventually define everything she built professionally. After graduating from Swarthmore College with a degree in computer science and economics, her first industry job landed her at BuzzFeed as a production tools engineer, where she produced narrative video content spotlighting communities of color. The pivot toward entertainment came next, with a role at DreamWorks Animation supporting productions including Fast and Furious: Spy Racers, Dragons: Rescue Riders, and Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous. Voiceover, though, was the destination she had been angling toward the entire time.

Breaking Into Games – Genshin Impact, Spider-Man 2, and the Hoyo Universe

Byrd’s entry into high-profile game work came through HoYoverse’s open world titles. Her earliest confirmed credit in Genshin Impact dates to 2020, where she voiced multiple supporting characters including Faranak, Kaveh’s mother, a role she announced publicly in 2023. The credit placed her inside one of the most-played live service games on the planet, and it set the stage for deeper collaboration with the studio. On the Western AAA front, she secured a role in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023), Insomniac Games’ blockbuster sequel, further cementing her presence in the industry’s most competitive tier. Around the same period she also appeared in Starfield, Bethesda’s space RPG, and Atlas Fallen, the action game from Deck13, extending her footprint across multiple major publishers in a single release cycle.

Rappa and the Honkai: Star Rail Breakthrough

The role that sharpened Byrd’s public profile most decisively arrived with Rappa in Honkai: Star Rail (2023), a pink-haired, chaotic ninja whose energy demanded a performer willing to go fully unhinged. Byrd delivered. Her official announcement of the role drew substantial attention on social media, with fans of the character responding enthusiastically to the casting. Rappa represented something specific in Byrd’s career – a lead-tier character with a dedicated fanbase, voiced in one of the world’s most-played gacha titles at peak cultural visibility. HoYoverse even produced a dedicated “Creating the Voice of Rappa” video feature with Byrd, an acknowledgment reserved for characters with significant player investment.

Animation, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Barbie, and the Netflix Writing Room

The animation side of Byrd’s career runs parallel to her games work and is equally active. In Yu-Gi-Oh! GO RUSH!! (2022-2025) she voiced Meowdestar, while the Barbie franchise brought her the role of Nikki, a recurring character with meaningful series presence. She has also appeared in Rainbow High and the Pokemon short Dragonite and the Special Delivery (2025), where she voiced Rio. What distinguishes her position within the animation ecosystem is that she operates not just as a performer but as a staff writer at Netflix Animation – a dual role that is genuinely uncommon and speaks to the range of her creative investment. Her theater work in Los Angeles, with institutions including the Wallis Annenberg Center and the Independent Shakespeare Company, feeds directly into the craft underneath the microphone work.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and the Expanding Credit List

Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024) added another landmark franchise to Byrd’s resume, with her appearing in additional voice roles across the highly anticipated sequel. The same year brought Infinity Nikki, where she voiced Eltinada – later confirmed separately as Giroda, a knight character she described publicly as a personal favorite. Into 2025 and 2026 her credits have continued to expand: Yaiba: Samurai Legend (Keiko Momoi), and SHIBOYUGI (Kaya and Sugiyama) are among the most recent confirmed additions. The throughline across all of it is a performer who arrived in voiceover from an unconventional direction and has built, in a short number of years, one of the denser credit lists among working performers in her cohort.