Heather Taylor | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | Canadian |
Other names | Heather Arness |
Citizenship | Canadian British |
Education | MA creative writing |
Alma mater | City University |
Occupation(s) | Film director, writer |
Years active | 2002–present |
Awards | Wandsworth Community Champion, 2011 |
Heather Taylor (born in Edmonton, Alberta) is a Canadian writer, and director. Taylor studied music, acting and writing in western Canada and London, England. [1]
In the UK, she was a featured performer at events/ venues including Spit Lit, the Victoria & Albert Museum, [2] Borders, Poetry Café, [3] Book Slam, RADA, Camberwell Arts Festival, [4] Harrow Festival, Runnymede International Literature Festival, Penned in the Margins, [5] and Glastonbury Festival. [6] She has also performed at the Arnolfini Gallery (Bristol) and The Guardian Newsroom as part of the Remember Ken Saro-Wiwa project [7] and has been a member of Apples and Snakes and Malika's Poetry Kitchen. [8]
From 2005 to 2007, Taylor toured the two-woman poetry and music show Accents on Words with Aoife Mannix. It was launched at the Poetry Café in London in November 2005 and was performed at a number of venues, including The British Library with BBC Radio London, [9] BAC with Apples and Snakes, The Aran Islands (Ireland) and India with the British Council for Mumbai Poetry Live. In December 2007, Heather Taylor took part in first Belgrade International Poetry festival "Beogradski Trg".
Past projects also include poetry and performance with the BlackFriars Settlement (girls aged 11–16) and the Women's Library. [10] She has two full poetry collections: Horizon & Back (Tall Lighthouse, UK, 2005) and Sick Day Afternoons (Treci Trg, Serbia, 2009). [11]
As a playwright, Taylor's work has been seen at the Tricycle Theatre, Soho Theatre, Greenwich Theatre, the Pleasance, [12] Etcetera Theatre [13] and Theatre503 in London as well as New Place in St. Albans, G12 in Glasgow as part of the NewWriting NewWorlds Festival. [14] She graduated with an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from City University. [15] Her play Prisms was the Sunday Play on Resonance FM, 16 December 2010.
In 2008, Taylor co-wrote a Bengali western called The Last Thakur . It was a Channel 4 co-production with Artificial Eye as the distributor. The film was received well by critics and Sight & Sound magazine named The Last Thakur "one of the most confident British debut features since Asif Kapadia's The Warrior (2001)... with which it shares an Asian location and language and a welcome belief in the primacy of visual storytelling." [16]
The film premiered at the London Film Festival [17] and was shown at the Dubai International Film Festival, Mumbai International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, [18] and others and finally had its theatrical release in the United Kingdom on 29 June 2009. [16]
The short documentary, Wild West Dream, was produced and co-directed by Taylor through Red on Black Productions and was the official selection at the Atlantic Film Festival [19] and the Edmonton International Film Festival [20] in 2009.
In 2011, Taylor created the web series Raptured, [21] which is distributed by Koldcast. [22] In 2012, she released the food series Home Baked Stories.
Taylor wrote and directed the short horror film, Stitched, in 2016. It was named one of 20 cool things seen at 2016’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival: "The final, perfect beat of Heather Taylor’s short, Stitched, and Deborah Green’s glowing performance that sells the whole thing." [23] She went on to write and direct Pay to Stay which premiered at the Queens World Film Festival in 2019. [24]
From 2018 to 2019, Taylor was a resident of the Bell Media Prime Time TV Program at the Canadian Film Centre, presented in association with ABC Signature Studios. [25]
Taylor co-created the podcast, Anomaly, [26] with Hillary Nussbaum under the banner of Cereal Made, the company they co-founded. [27] The podcast was included in The Gotham Film & Media Institute's Audio Hub in September 2020 [28] and in 2021, Anomaly was an official selection of Tribeca Festival's inaugural podcast program. [29]
In 2022, Taylor co-created the podcast, Braaains, [30] with her sister, film & television editor, Sarah Taylor. [31] Braaains is a podcast exploring the inner workings of our brains and how film & television portray them and often includes guests with lived experiences of mental illness and disabilities.
Taylor was a story editor on season two of The Hardy Boys (2020 TV series). She co-wrote two episodes: S2.E2 - Conflicting Reports with Nile Seguin [32] and S2.E8 - A Midnight Scare with Laura Seaton. [33] Taylor and Seaton were nominated for a 2023 Writers Guild of Canada Screenwriting Award for their efforts. [34]
During the fall of 2022, Taylor was a TV fellow as part of the RespectAbility Entertainment Lab for entertainment professionals with disabilities. [35]
Taylor wrote and directed Breaking Up, [36] an episode of James Kim's narrative fiction podcast, You Feeling This. [37] The podcast series had its world premiere at The Tribeca Festival 2023. [38] [39]
Taylor was the Director of Creative Strategy at The Economist from 2015 to 2018. [40] She has held executive roles at Weber Shandwick and Ogilvy [41] and was the North American Editorial Director for Econsultancy. [42] She was the former Corporate Community Manager for the BBC, [43] social media and PR manager for Giffgaff [44] and the former editor and filmmaker for PayPal's Let's Talk social media and consumer advocacy website. [45] While in that role, in addition to PayPal related topics, she regularly produced video interviews with experts in mobile, finance, social media and web development.
In 2011, she was listed by Brand Republic [46] as one of the top 200 most influential bloggers.
Taylor organised the cleanup in Clapham Junction after the London Riots in August 2011 [47] and led what is now referred to as the Broom Army. [48] She won a Wandsworth Community Champion award [49] for her efforts.
Year | Title | Notes | Credits |
---|---|---|---|
2008 | The Last Thakur | Feature film | Writer |
2009 | Wild West Dream | Short Doc | Director/ Producer |
Stay Safe | Short | Writer | |
2011 | Raptured – season 1 | Web series | Writer/ Director/ Producer |
Book of the Dead | Short | Writer | |
2012 | Home Baked Stories | Web series | Director/ Producer |
The Last Job | Short | Writer | |
2016 | Stitched | Short | Director/ Writer |
2019 | Pay to Stay | Short | Director/ Writer |
2021 | Anomaly | Podcast | Creator/ Writer |
Lethal Love | TV Movie | Writer | |
2022 | The Hardy Boys (2020 TV series) | TV series | Story Editor Season 2 Co-writer Ep. 202 (Conflicting Reports) & 208 (A Midnight Scare) |
2023 | You Feeling This? | Podcast | Writer/ Director Ep.9 (Breaking Up) |
Kenule Beeson "Ken" Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian writer, television producer, and environmental activist. Ken Saro-Wiwa was a member of the Ogoni people, an ethnic minority in Nigeria whose homeland, Ogoniland, in the Niger Delta, has been targeted for crude oil extraction since the 1950s and has suffered extreme environmental damage from decades of indiscriminate petroleum waste dumping.
Tribeca, originally written as TriBeCa, is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in New York City. Its name is a syllabic abbreviation of "Triangle Below Canal Street". The "triangle" is bounded by Canal Street, West Street, Broadway, and Chambers Street. By the 2010s, a common marketing tactic was to extend Tribeca's southern boundary to either Vesey or Murray Streets to increase the appeal of property listings.
Kenule "Ken" Bornale Tsaro-Wiwa, also known as Ken Saro-Wiwa, Jr, although he himself chose to use the name Ken Wiwa, was a Nigerian journalist and author. The eldest son of human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, he worked as an adviser to three Nigerian presidents.
The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), is a social movement organization representing the indigenous Ogoni people of Rivers State, Nigeria. The Ogoni contend that Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), along with other petroleum multinationals and the Nigerian government, have destroyed their environment, polluted their rivers, and provided no benefits in return for enormous oil revenues extracted from their lands.
The Tribeca Festival is an annual film festival organized by Tribeca Productions. It takes place each spring in New York City, showcasing a diverse selection of film, episodic, talks, music, games, art, and immersive programming. Tribeca was founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff in 2002 to spur the economic and cultural revitalization of Lower Manhattan following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Until 2020, the festival was known as the Tribeca Film Festival.
Nii Ayikwei Parkes, born in the United Kingdom to parents from Ghana, where he was raised, is a performance poet, writer, publisher and sociocultural commentator. He is one of 39 writers aged under 40 from sub-Saharan Africa who in April 2014 were named as part of the Hay Festival's prestigious Africa39 project. He writes for children under the name K.P. Kojo.
Kadija George, Hon. FRSL, also known as Kadija Sesay, is a British literary activist, short story writer and poet of Sierra Leonean descent, and the publisher and managing editor of the magazine SABLE LitMag. Her work has earned her many awards and nominations, including the Cosmopolitan Woman of Achievement in 1994, Candace Woman of Achievement in 1996, The Voice Community Award in Literature in 1999 and the Millennium Woman of the Year in 2000. She is the General Secretary for African Writers Abroad and organises the Writers' HotSpot – trips for writers abroad, where she teaches creative writing and journalism courses.
Evanna Patricia Lynch is an Irish actress and activist. She is best known for portraying Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter film series.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Zoe Lister-Jones is an American actress and filmmaker who co-starred as Jen Collins Short in the CBS sitcom Life in Pieces from 2015 to 2019. She is also known for her roles in the television shows Delocated (2009–2010), Whitney (2011–2013), and New Girl (2015). Lister-Jones made her directorial debut with the 2017 comedy-drama film Band Aid. In 2020, she wrote and directed the horror film The Craft: Legacy. She also co-wrote and co-directed the comedy-drama film How It Ends (2021) with Daryl Wein.
Deborah Ann Harry is an American singer, songwriter and actress, best known as the lead vocalist of the band Blondie. Four of her songs with the band reached No. 1 on the US charts between 1979 and 1981.
Nathan Penlington, is a writer, poet, live literature producer and magician. His work has appeared on stage, in print and on the radio.
Platform London is an interdisciplinary London-based art and campaigning collective founded in 1983 that creates projects with social justice and environmental justice themes. Platform describes itself as "bringing together environmentalists, artists, human rights campaigners, educationalists and community activists to create innovative projects driven by the need for social and environmental justice. This interdisciplinary approach combines the transformatory power of art with the tangible goals of campaigning, the rigour of in-depth research with the vision to promote alternative futures."
Zina Saro-Wiwa is a Brooklyn-based video artist and filmmaker. She makes video installations, documentaries, music videos and experimental films.
James Byrne is a British poet and translator who edited The Wolf magazine from 2002 to 2017. He was born in Buckinghamshire in 1977. His most recent poetry collections include Everything Broken Up Dances, published by Tupelo Press in the United States and White Coins, both in 2015. Other published collections include Blood/Sugar by Arc Publications in 2009, and he has also published pamphlets, including SOAPBOXES and Myth of the Savage Tribes, Myth of Civilised Nations, a collaborative work with the poet Sandeep Parmar. For many years James has been consistently talked of as 'one of the leading poets of his generation', endorsed by The Times as one of the 'ten rising stars of British poetry' in April 2009. He lives in England after two years in New York City, where he received a Stein scholarship and an MFA from New York University. He was the poet in residence at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, from 2011 to 2012 and is a senior lecturer at Edge Hill University, where he teaches poetry and poetics.
Eleanor Jane Taylor is an English comedian, television personality, actress, and writer. After appearing as a contestant on Show Me the Funny in 2011, Taylor has appeared on numerous television shows, including 8 Out of 10 Cats (2011–2017), Fake Reaction (2013–2014), Mock the Week (2015–2019), The Lodge (2016), Stand-Up Central (2017), The Mash Report (2017–2022), Plebs (2018–2019), and Strictly Come Dancing (2022). She has also presented the shows Snog Marry Avoid? (2012–2013), Live at the Apollo (2016–2018), and Cheat (2023).
Malika Zouhali-Worrall is a British-Moroccan film director and editor.
Noo Saro-Wiwa is a British-Nigerian author, noted for her travel writing. She is the daughter of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Kate Gordon Siegelbaum, known professionally as Kate Siegel, is an American actress and screenwriter. She is best known for her collaborations with her husband, filmmaker Mike Flanagan, appearing in his films Oculus (2013), Hush (2016), which she also co-wrote, Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), and Gerald's Game (2017), as well as in his television series The Haunting of Hill House (2018), The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), Midnight Mass (2021), and The Fall of the House of Usher (2023). She has been dubbed a "scream queen" due to her work in horror films and television.
Zena Edwards is a British writer, poet, performer and multidisciplinary collaborator, who explores her African roots in work that utilises her musical talents. She has performed internationally at festivals, as well as in schools and colleges. She has been described as "one [of] the most unique voices of performance poetry to come out of London".