Taylor Black is ICI's Communications and Digital Content Manager and a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. Previously, Taylor was Associate Editor at the Brooklyn Museum, where they led numerous website editorial projects and collaborated on exhibitions including Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven, Modern Gothic: The Inventive Furniture of Kimbel and Cabus, 1863–82, and Lorraine O'Grady: Both/And. Taylor is also a co-founder of The Ritual Division, an artist-run space in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
Taylor's academic work applies the principles of performance theory to social media platforms and considers the role of fabrication—making things and making things up—across artistic and digital media contexts. As a former theatrical scenographer, Taylor is explicitly interested in how things are made and the ways that labor and collaborative action informs artistic acts of world-making. They have taught courses on digital media studies, performance studies, and writing at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Their writing has been published in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, The Brooklyn Rail, tba, Theatre Is Easy, and TDR: The Drama Review, as well as the very non-weekly newsletter This Week In Fake.
In addition to academic and artistic work, Taylor has continually worked in the tech education space, advocating for tactical technology education and media literacy and teaching coding and creative computing in K-12 and informal settings. Collaborators have included Ada & Leo, Endeavor Middle School, ITP NYC, CryptoParty, The Yes Men, CyPurr Collective, and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.).