She held the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Aesthetic Theory and Material Performance at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.
In 1987, she and David Bunn co-edited From South Africa (University of Chicago Press), an anthology which documents the Years of Emergency in the last decade of apartheid in that country, through new photography, graphics, literature.
"Fault Lines" was also, more broadly, a series of cultural responses which she initiated in order to draw artists from the international community into exploring the discourses and practices of Truth and Reconciliation.
She later edited Handspring Puppet Company (David Krut publishers, 2009), a substantial study of this world-renowned South African performance troupe.
The Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt commissioned Taylor as one of a dozen playwrights to make a version of "Cardenio", a play allegedly written originally by Shakespeare, and that has disappeared leaving nothing but the name of the work.