Diana Taylor
University Professor, Performance Studies & Spanish
Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), which won the Best Book Award given by New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Mention in the Joe E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama; of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's 'Dirty War', Duke U.P., 1997; and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke U.P., 2003), which won the ATHE Research Award in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy and the Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for the best book in Latin American and Spanish Literatures and Culture (2004). The Archive and the Repertoire has been translated into Portuguese by Eliana Lourenço de Lima Reis (Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais 2012) and Spanish by Anabelle Contreras (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2015.) Her Acciones de memoria: Performance, historia, y trauma, was published in Peru by Fondo Editorial de la Asamblea Nacional de Rectores (2012). Performance, first published in Spanish in Buenos Aires (Asuntos Impresos, 2012), was revised and published in English with Duke U.P. 2016, and in Polish (Performans, Universitas, 2018). 'PerformancePerformance' and '퍼포먼스퍼포먼스'. Soeul: Rasun Press, is forthcoming, 2021. Performance, politica e memoria culturale, edited by Fabrizio Deriu (Rome: Editoriale Artemide) came out in 2019. ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence, Duke University Press 2020, ¡Presente! La política de la presencia! translated into Spanish by Ana Stevenson, Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Chile), 2021,¡Presente!, A Política da Presença, translated into Portuguese by Adelaine La Guardia, Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, forthcoming 2022.
She is co-editor of Estudios avanzados de Performance (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011), Stages of Conflict: A Reader in Latin American Theatre and Performance (Michigan U. P., 2008), Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform (Duke U.P.,2004), Defiant Acts/Actos Desafiantes: Four Plays by Diana Raznovich (Bucknell U. P., 2002), Negotiating Performance in Latin/o America: Gender, Sexuality and Theatricality (Duke U.P., 1994), and The Politics of Motherhood: Activists from Left to Right, (University Press of New England, 1997). She has edited five volumes of critical essays on Latin American, Latino, and Spanish playwrights, and several digital books such as What is Performance Studies (co-edited with Marcos Steuernagle) and Dancing with the Zapatistas (Duke U.P. 2016) Her articles on Latin American and Latino performance have appeared in journals such as PMLA, Profession, Critical Inquiry, TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, e-misférica, Performing Arts Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, Estreno, Gestos, Signs, MLQ and other scholarly journals. She has also been invited to participate in discussions on the role of new technologies in the arts and humanities in important conferences and commissions in the Americas (i.e. ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure).
Taylor was the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship, 2013-14, and a Research Fellowship at the Institut d’Etudes Avancée de Paris, 2016-2017. She was President of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 2017. Diana Taylor is Founder and Past Director, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, funded by the Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller, Rockefeller Brothers and Henry Luce Foundations. In 2018, Diana Taylor 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.”
