About

Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at NYU. Her research explores the intersection of performance, memory, and social justice in the Americas. She has authored notable books including Theatre of Crisis, which received the Best Book Award from the New England Council on Latin American Studies, and The Archive and the Repertoire, which earned both the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the Kathleen Singer Kovacs Award from the Modern Language Association, of which she served as President in 2017. Taylor is the founder and past director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, supported by prominent foundations. Throughout her career, she has received numerous fellowships and honors, such as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, support from the Mellon Foundation, and an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship. She held a research fellowship at the Institut d’Études Avancées de Paris and has been recognized with induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Edwin Booth Award, and the Rodolfo Usigli Medal, among others. Taylor writes in both English and Spanish, and her work has been widely translated into multiple languages, reflecting her significant contributions to the fields of performance, social justice, and Latin American cultural studies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Epistemology
• Humanities
• Engineering
• Computer Science
• Geography
• Philosophy
• Theology
• Environmental science
• Meteorology
• Ancient history
• Physics
• Political economy
• Law
• Medicine
• Art
• Cartography
• History
• Psychology
• Mathematics
• Mechanical engineering

Selected publications

• From The Archive and The Repertoire

  2025-01-21 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Diana Taylor is an interdisciplinary scholar and former Chair of NYU’s Department of Performance Studies whose work in the areas of theatre, performance, and Latin American studies has produced a series of publications firmly rooted in the tension between politics, performance, and place. As Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Taylor established a network of artists, scholars, and activists who gather, organize, and share research through conferences, artistic collaborations, and publication. In her influential book, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), Taylor argues that performance of embodied memory (the repertoire) can provide a valuable counterweight to written records (the archive), especially in regard to the contested history of intercultural encounter in the Americas. Reminding us that how we define our research methodology is crucial to determining the object of our analysis, Taylor celebrates performance studies as a project while pushing us to go further in examining our own assumptions about what we do and where we do it.

  PublisherDOI

• Les archives en performance, la performance en archive

  Hermann eBooks · 2025-11-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Memória reparadora: endereçando amnésia, performando trauma

  GIS - Gesto Imagem e Som - Revista de Antropologia · 2023-04-20

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Desde o início da Covid-19, muitos de nós tivemos que lidar com o trauma da perda – a perda de vidas, o desaparecimento de meios de vida, a destruição ambiental, os pressupostos sobre responsabilidade social e política. Sem opor experiências e tratamentos de trauma individualizados e coletivos, proponho que práticas performativas de memória reparativa e performances motivadas por experiências de trauma oferecem às vítimas, aos sobreviventes e ativistas formas para responder às repercussões globais e locais da pandemia, nos estimulando a imaginar futuros de vida possíveis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dialogue and Repertoire: The Ever-Changing Nature of Walking and Talking Together

  Documenta · 2023-07-17

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This conversation between Professor Diana Taylor and Dr. Andrea Maciel presents Taylor’s life-long experience fostering art and activism, as well as promoting dialogical research encounters through The Hemispheric Institute of Performance & Politics. The discussion encompasses the role of the archive as part of a mutual collaboration between performance and practice as research whilst opening a critical inquiry on how new epistemologies for artists and researchers can contemplate the archive as a force for the creation of laboratorial praxis.  Drawing on her long experience as a core member of Cross Pollination (CP), an international arts research platform for the exchange of knowledge and nomadic laboratory spaces, Maciel invites Taylor to also reflect about the power of performances and somatic practices to trace trauma related to social cultural alienation and oppression.

  PublisherDOI

• TDR volume 67 issue 2 Cover and Front matter

  TDR/The Drama Review · 2023

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Environmental science

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

  DOI

• Actos de memoria reparadora

  Investigación Teatral Revista de artes escénicas y performatividad · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Humanities
  • Political Science

  Desde el inicio de la pandemia del Covid-19, muchos de nosotros hemos tenido que lidiar con el trauma de la pérdida: las vidas perdidas, los medios de vida que han desaparecido, la destrucción del medio ambiente, así como las violentas desigualdades sociales y políticas expuestas una vez más por la pandemia. Sin oponer las experiencias personales del trauma a las colectivas, propongo aquí que las prácticas de memoria reparadora basadas en la actuación y las actuaciones impulsadas por el trauma ofrecen a las víctimas, los supervivientes y los activistas formas de abordar las repercusiones globales/locales de la pandemia que también, indirectamente, nos ayudan a imaginar futuros habitables. Acts of Reparative Memory Abstract Since the onset of Covid-19, many of us have had to deal with the trauma of loss: the lives lost, the livelihoods that have disappeared, the destruction of the environment, and the violent social and political inequalities exposed once again by the pandemic. Without opposing individualized experiences of trauma to collective ones, I propose here that reconstructive memory practices based on trauma-driven action and actions offer victims, survivors, and activists ways to address the global/local impacts of the pandemic that also, indirectly, help us imagine livable futures. Recibido: 02 de julio de 2022Aceptado: 02 de septiembre de 2022

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Political Lives of Performance

  FrancoAngeli srl eBooks · 2021-01-01

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Everything about performance is political -from its definition, to its artistic practice, to its broader intervention into social and communal life as a form of protest or manifestation, to its archiving and study.This essay explores the complexities of the many aspects and lives of performance by focusing on the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (Hemi) that came into existence to address several challenges facing researchers, artists, and activists committed to social justice in the Americas.Given the colonial infrastructure still operative in the Americas, the multiple parts of the "periphery" pass through the cultural, financial "center" of empire, like spokes of a wheel, without having direct interactions with each other.Those of us working in various national and regional parts of the hemisphere did not usually know each other.We had few ways of accessing information and the scholarly and artistic materials we needed about the work being created in other parts of the hemisphere.How could we learn, research, teach, and create in any socially relevant manner when we knew so little about what was happening around us? How could we build communities of care, collaboration, and shared practice in support of progressive politics of rights, equality, and inclusion?In 1998 when I founded Hemi in collaboration with colleagues in Brazil and Mexico, the goal was to create new avenues for collaboration and action by researching politically engaged performance and amplifying it through gatherings, courses, publications, and archives.Our fundamental belief was that «artistic practice, performance, and critical reflection can spark lasting cultural change».But there were many problems we needed to address at the same time.The Americas are deeply interdependent, sharing brutal and rapacious histories of conquest, colonisation, imperialism, and neoliberalism characterized by genocide, slavery, occupation, annexation, and extractivist politics that continue to threaten any hopes of equality and self-determination into the present.The United States, where Hemi is funded and administered, sits in the heart of empire, in the very belly of the murderous beast.How could we begin to earn the trust that is essential to all collaborative projects without interrogating the dynamics and extensiveness of the power differentials generated by empire?

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Presente : The Politics of Presence

  2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  In ¡Presente! Diana Taylor asks what it means to be physically and politically present in situations where it seems that nothing can be done. As much an act, a word, an attitude, a theoretical intervention, and a performance pedagogy, Taylor maps ¡presente! at work in scenarios ranging from conquest, through colonial enactments and resistance movements, to present moments of capitalist extractivism and forced migration in the Americas. ¡Presente!-present among, with, and to; a walking and talking with others; an ontological and epistemic reflection on presence and subjectivity as participatory and relational, founded on mutual recognition-requires rethinking and unlearning in ways that challenge colonial epistemologies. Showing how knowledge is not something to be harvested but a process of being, knowing, and acting with others, Taylor models a way for scholarship to be present in political struggles

• Salon for a speculative future

  CentAUR (University of Reading) · 2020-01-01

  article

  The Salon for a Speculative Future was inaugurated in March 2019 in celebration of Women’s History Month, as a platform for cross-generational and cross-disciplinary exchange. Reflecting on the current political and economic global situation, in particular the exponential acceleration of a technology-driven platform capitalism, many women advocate positive change for an ecologically sustainable and humane future. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin argues that science fiction does not simply extrapolate from the present to predict the future—instead, the fiction writer engages in thought-experiments where ideas and intuition move within the confines set by the experiment. This book hosts imaginative thinking by seventy-five women artists, sharing their influences, inspired by women’s contributions to diverse fields, from art, education, and science to political activism. Salon for a Speculative Future honours and shares insights and experimental thinking towards a positive future.

  Publisher

• 6 Disappearing Bodies: Writing Torture and Torture as Writing

  2020-11-27 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Richard Schechner

  Sanford Broadway Medical Center

  87 shared

• William H. Sun

  John Brown University

  86 shared

• Guillermo Gómez‐Peña

  New York University Press

  86 shared

• Sharon Aronson-Lehavi

  85 shared

• Deavere Smith

  Sanford Broadway Medical Center

  85 shared

• Amelia Jones

  85 shared

• Mariellen R. Sandford

  Sanford Broadway Medical Center

  85 shared

• Catie Cuan

  Tisch Hospital

  85 shared

Awards & honors

• Rodolfo Usigli Medal for Theatre awarded by Theatre Rodolfo…
• Elected as International Fellow, British Academy, 2025
• N.E.H. Digital Publication Fellowship, Jan 1- Dec. 31, 2025
• Edwin Booth Award (CUNY), 2021
• Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 201…