Julie Taymor

Julie Taymor is a director and designer for theatre, opera, and film. Her designs are defined by the use of traditional East Asian puppet and mask techniques from Japan and Indonesia. She combines various cultures and styles from both Eastern and Western techniques to create a coherent whole. Her training is vast and spans across film, mime, ritual and masked dance, method acting, experimental ensemble creation, and puppetry. Despite having no formal training in art, stage design, or directing (she trained as an actor), Taymor has done costume and scenic design, directed, and written for theatre, opera, and film.

Julie Taymor was born on the 15th of December 1952 in Boston to Jewish parents and became involved in theatre at an early age. At age 10, she was a member of the Boston Children’s Theatre and participated in Julie Portman’s Theatre Workshop. At age 13, Taymor first encountered Eastern theatre traditions when she traveled to India and Sri Lanka with the Experiment in International Living. She was greatly influenced by the richness and the extremities of street life in India and how quickly people are anaesthetised to the suffering of others. At 16, she then traveled to Paris to study at L’Ecole de Mime Jacques LeCoq to help refine her body to convey character and emotion.

In 1970, Taymor entered Oberlin College and studied acting at the Herbert Berghoff school. While in college, she was in residence at Open Theatre, the Chelsea Theatre Company, and the Bread and Puppet Theatre in New York. She then returned to Ohio and joined Herbert Blau’s experimental theatre troupe and it is her experiences with this group that conveyed to her the importance of ideographs that later shaped her directing techniques. After graduation in 1974, Taymor received a Watson Fellowship to study visually oriented theatre and experimental and traditional puppetry in East Asia.