Diana Taylor (born 1950) is an American academic. She is a professor of performance studies and Spanish at New York University' s Tisch School of the Arts and the founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. She is also the president of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 2017–2018. Her work focuses on Latin American and U.S. theatre and performance, performance and politics, feminist theatre and performance in the Americas, Hemispheric studies, and trauma studies. She is married to Eric Manheimer, former New York Bellevue Hospital medical director and current producer of the NBC television show New Amsterdam.
Taylor graduated from the Universidad de las Américas, A.C. in Mexico, where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in creative writing in 1971,[1] and another degree from Aix-Marseille University in France.[2] She earned a master's degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1974 and a PhD from the University of Washington in 1981,[1] both of which in comparative literature.[2]
Taylor taught at Dartmouth College from 1982 to 1997.[1] She is a professor of performance studies and Spanish at New York University' s Tisch School of the Arts.[2] She is also the founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.[2] She became the second vice president of the Modern Language Association in December 2014.[1] She served as its president from January 2017 to January 2018.[1]
Taylor received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005.[2] She won the Best Book Award by New England Council on Latin American Studies for Theatre of Crisis, and the Outstanding Book award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education and the Kathleen Singer Kovaks Award from the Modern Language Association (MLA) for The Archive and the Repertoire.[2]