Jane Taylor

Jane Taylor (1956-) is a lecturer, academic and playwright.

Biography

Born on 19 April 1956

She obtained a Ph.D in English from Northwestern University, Chicago, with a study on Restoration theatre and the new commodity markets.

Professor Jane Taylor held the Skye Chair of Dramatic Art at the University of the Witwatersrand. Taylor teaches film studies, with a particular emphasis on the thriller and psychoanalytic theory.

She has won Rockefeller and Mellon Fellowships.

Contribution to South African theatre, film, media and performance

As cultural researcher

She has written widely on contemporary South African culture, and in 1987 she co-edited From South Africa with David Bunn (University of Chicago Press). In 1996 she curated "Fault Lines," an exhibition about issues of truth and reconciliation. In 1998, she curated "Holdings" Rethinking the Archive" (David Philip publishers, 2002). In 2009 she edited Handspring Puppet Company (David Krut Publications)

Author of an article called "Contemporary Collaborators I: Kentridge/Handspring/Taylor" in Middeke, Schnierer and Homann (2015).

As playwright and theatre maker

In 1996 she wrote the play Ubu and the Truth Commission for the Handspring Puppet Company. She has, with composer Kevin Volans, written a new piece of music theatre based on the work of Italo Svevo. Directed by the artist William Kentridge, the production was commissioned by DOKUMENTA, 2002. This piece opened at the KunstenFest in Brussels in 2001. In 1999, Taylor directed Puccini's La Boheme for the Spier Theatre Festival in Cape Town.