Jane Taylor

Jane Taylor is a South African who now holds the Wole Soyinka Chair of Theatre at the University of Leeds. She is a creative writer as well as a scholar, curator and theatre director. Her primary areas of scholarship include early modern theatre studies. In particular Taylor has an interest in the Reformation and its impact on modes of staging the Self. For some years she has been engaged in the study of puppetry arts and has written two puppet plays for Handspring Puppet Company and William Kentridge; and edited the recent study “Handspring Puppet Company”. In 1996 she established “FaultLines”, a series of arts responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa; at which time she wrote the play text of “Ubu and the Truth Commission”. She has lectured frequently on the Art and the Politics of transitional justice. She has published frequently on the work of WIlliam Kentridge and is currently finishing a manuscript for the University of Chicago on Kentridge’s production of “The Nose” at the New York Metropolitan Opera. She has been a Visiting Fellow at Oxford and at Cambridge, and has been the recipient of Mellon and Rockefeller Fellowships.

As of June 2016