Jane Taylor is a South African scholar, curator, cultural theorist, and writer. In 1996, she designed and curated “Fault Lines,” commissioning a series of cultural responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. She also wrote the play text Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), working with Handspring Puppet Company and artist/director William Kentridge. Again working with Kentridge, she wrote the libretto of The Confessions of Zeno (2001), a piece commissioned for documenta 11 by Okwui Enwezor. Most recently, she published The Transplant Men (2009), a novel grounded in the history of the first human heart transplant in South Africa in the 1960s.
Taylor co-edited with From South Africa (1988), an anthology of graphics and writing archiving the State of Emergency (during the last decade of Apartheid) in South Africa in the 1980s and up to 1994. She has been the recipient of Mellon and Rockefeller fellowships, as well as visiting fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge. From 2000 to 2009, she held the Skye Chair of Dramatic Art at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is currently a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and the University of the Western Cape. Her first novel, Of Wild Dogs (2005), won the prestigious Olive Schreiner Award. Taylor edited a book on the Handspring Puppet Company (2010) that considers the distinctive modes of possession and representation at work in puppetry. She is writing a book on the making of William Kentridge’s The Nose.