Professor Diana Taylor
Performance Studies Professor Diana Taylor has been conferred The Edwin Booth Award from CUNY Grad Center’s Theatre and Performance Department.
The award began in 1983 and it honors a person, organization, or company for their outstanding contributions to the NYC theatre community. Diana’s career, her friendships and her activism highlight that our theatre community exists both in and outside of our academic spaces. In her honor, the ceremony will be dedicated to reflecting on activism within academia. Since she co-founded the Institute for Women and Social Change (1993), to the Institute for Performance and Politics (1995), to the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (1998), Diana Taylor has dedicated her career to bringing artists, activists, scholars, and students together to discuss and act on the urgent social issues of our time. Scholarship, she argues in her books, is also a form of activism, an intervention that can channel the expertise and resources of universities to engage other communities of practice. What can we do, she asks, when apparently nothing can be done, and doing nothing is not an option? A lot.
The Ph.D. program in Theatre and Performance, The Graduate Center, CUNY, The Doctoral Theatre Students’ Association, and Martin E. Segal Theatre Center present The 2021 Edwin Booth Award to Diana Taylor with a ceremony on May 14, 2021. Join us in celebrating Diana Taylor and a lifetime of Activism within Academia. After the online event, we will move to Washington Square Park (the Garibaldi Square) to conclude the ceremony with an in-person celebration that includes a live performance, presentation of the award to Professor Taylor and a "silent" dance party.