Arts & Entertainment

Julie Taymor Honored at Brooklyn Museum

Gloria Steinem calls famed Lion King director a "genius" at Sackler Center Feminist Art First Awards.

This article was written by Megan Riesz

The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art honored award-winning film, theater and opera director Julie Taymor on Thursday night – an artist who feminist activist Gloria Steinem said was maybe the first person she had ever called a genius.

Sackler herself presented Taymor with an Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art First Award designed by Judy Chicago, creator of the Center’s main installation piece The Dinner Party.

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In her acceptance speech, Taymor thanked her mother – who was in the audience – for encouraging her to pursue her dreams.

“I’m so happy to be here and so proud that my mom is with me,” Taymor said. “She really is the reason. She and her husband together. She is because she’s always been out there working since I was a child in politics, out there trying to make women have the possibilities to do anything they want to do. And she always said I could.”

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Taymor became the first woman to receive a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical in 1998 for The Lion King. She also directed Frida (2002), which chronicles the life of surrealist painter Frida Kahlo, and Across the Universe (2007), a musical film set during the time of the Vietnam War featuring music by the Beatles. 

Taymor also originally directed the Broadway musical Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark before being fired by producers and filing a lawsuit against them.

Before receiving her award, Taymor sat down with feminist icon Gloria Steinem for an onstage conversation about her childhood and artistic inclinations.

“I have always resisted being classified,” said Taymor, who grew up in Boston and went to Oberlin College in Ohio before traveling to Indonesia and other countries.

Taymor is now working on an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. She said she has a film in the works and is thinking about bringing Across the Universe to the stage.


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