Jane Taylor

Lecturer, academic and playwright.*** Professor Jane Taylor held the Skye Chair of Dramatic Art at the University of the Witwatersrand. She has a Ph.D in English from Northwestern University, Chicago, on Restoration theatre and the new commodity markets. 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 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. She has won Rockefeller and Mellon Fellowships. She has written on contemporary South African culture, and in 1987 she co-edited From South Africa with David Bunn (University of Chicago Press). Taylor teaches film studies, with a particular emphasis on the thriller and psychoanalytic theory. In 2009 she edited Handspring Puppet Company (David Krut Publications)

Author of an article called "Contemporary CollaboratorsI: Kentridge/Handspring/Taylor", published in Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer and Greg Homann (editors). The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary South African Theatre. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

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