Professor Diana Taylor FBA
- Fellow type
- International Fellow
- Year elected
- 2025
- Sections
- Culture, Media and Performance
Summary
Diana Taylor was born in Canada, raised in Mexico, and teaches in the US. She is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University.
Taylor is the award-winning author of multiple books, among them: Theatre of Crisis (1991), Disappearing Acts (1997), The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), Performance (2016), and ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (2020).
Taylor was the Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics from 1998 to 2020 (https://hemisphericinstitute.org/). Hemispheric brings scholars, artists, and activists from throughout the Americas to work and think together.
She helped develop the first ever digital video library, HIDVL, that holds over 1000 hours of streaming, non-downloadable videos of performance practices, a multilingual digital journal and book series, and team-taught online graduate courses. Her commitment has always been to open spaces for creative and scholarly interactions and collaborations.
She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and several other major awards. In 2017, Taylor was President of the Modern Language Association.
In 2018 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science. In 2021 she was awarded the Edwin Booth Award for “outstanding contribution to the NYC theatre community, and to promote integration of professional and academic theatre.”