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"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."
During his junior year while studying abroad in China, Taylor was granted DMCA equipment to create video segments that he would send back to his professors “from the field.” At that time he was working with a tiny 2 gig portable drive, laughable by our standards today, but at the cutting edge of what was being done before the era of YouTube. He was able to transmit his segments to his professors by dial-up modem which often would take all day and night to upload.
Being handed camera equipment with the expectations to produce forced Taylor to confront his own ambivalence towards using the camera in a foreign world. He felt the camera would inhibit his ability to become part of the foreign community, however he discovered it did just the opposite, and ultimately people welcomed him even more because of its presence. It was because of this experience that he began to embrace the life as a documentary filmmaker. His time in China was, no doubt, the foundation for his post-graduate freelance work, This experience also prepared him for his work later on as a journalist for outlets including the Associated Press, HBO, BBC, and PBS.
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 films about human rights subjects ranging from health care, freedom of the press, illegal immigration, refugee security, sexual violence, human smuggling and trafficking, and the genocide in Darfur. Recently in 2009, Taylor was granted the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism award for his work in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
As the 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. |
