"The Digital Media Center for the Arts was more than a first class environment into which I could disappear for countless hours to work on my own film projects. It was more than a meeting place for creative artists on campus, many of whom I continue to work with in New York. The DMCA became home in college, where I met Lee Faulkner, an extremely patient, talented, and supportive mentor who taught me the process of filmmaking, gave me the encouragement to pursue ambitious projects, and even sent me off to China with equipment from the YMMM grant, where I had the most informative filmmaking experience of my life."

Taylor Krauss, Film Studies 2002

Taylor spent the second semester of his junior year studying abroad in China. Using special DMCA equipment, he daily filmed and edited segments of his encounters on a portable drive that were then transmited back to Yale so that his experiences there could be communicated to his fellow students in "real time".

He noted that this process forced him to confront his own ambivalence towards the camera, especially when filming in uncomfortable situations, and he began to embrace life as a filmmaker. The camera practice Taylor obtained on this trip served as training for his post-graduate freelance jobs, and equipped him for his personal filmmaking endeavors.

After graduating with a degree in film studies, Taylor moved to LA and subsequently to New York to pursue documentary filmmaking where he trained under Ken Burns as an associate producer on The War, a seven-part series about the Second World War.  

Taylor has spent most of his professional career behind the camera working on various films about human rights subjects ranging from health care, freedom of the press, illegal immigration, refugee security, human smuggling and trafficking, and the genocide in Darfur.

As a founder of Voices of Rwanda, a not-for-profit dedicated to recording and preserving testimonies of eyewitnesses to the 1994 Rwanda genocide, Taylor splits his time between Kigali, Rwanda, and Brooklyn, NY. The testimonies will be made available in an archive in Rwanda and the United States and will be used in high schools across America to help educate students about the genocide that claimed over 800,000 lives in 100 days.