About the Artist
Merideth Taylor received a formal MFA equivalency in theater and dance from Southern Illinois University in 1980 based on her professional performing arts experience. She went on to a long career in higher education and currently is professor emerita of theater and dance at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She was a founding member of the African and African Diaspora Studies and Women Studies Programs at St. Mary’s and has taught in both programs in addition to teaching in, and chairing, the Department of Theater Film and Media Studies.
In her work as a director and playwright, she has focused on social justice issues and local history and has been active in the local community. She has been a member of Unified Committee for Afro-American Contributions (UCAC) since 1996 and has served as President and Vice President of the organization. Taylor served as project director of the St. Mary’s County component of the multi-county exhibit “Strive not to Equal but to Excel,” and was Co-editor of UCAC’s book, In Relentless Pursuit of an Education: African American Stories from a Century of Segregation, which received a 2007 Maryland African American Heritage Preservation Award. She is a long-time member of the NAACP and currently serves on the Education Committee. From 2007-2017, she served as a Trustee at Historic Sotterley Plantation and has been instrumental in helping Sotterley to develop new approaches to interpretation.
Taylor served as grant writer and project director on a 2011 IMLS Museums for America Engaging Communities grant “Reinterpreting Sotterley.” In 2011, her short film Historic Sotterley: A Tidewater Legacy received a Communicators International Award, and she went on to serve as project director and writer on Sotterley’s first permanent exhibit, “Land, Lives, and Labor.”
In 2004, Taylor carried out an oral history project with students at Great Mills High School that examined the process of desegregation at the school. The students interviewed former students, staff, and faculty who were at Great Mills between 1958 and 1972. Based on these and follow-up interviews that she conducted between 2003 and 2009, she wrote, directed, and co-produced with Phocus Video, the documentary With All Deliberate Speed: One High School’s Story. In 2010, she received a Historic Preservation Service Award from the St. Mary’s County Historic Preservation Committee and County Commissioners for With All Deliberate Speed, and it was selected for the 2016 and 2017 Southern Maryland Film Festivals, receiving the Audience Choice Award. Her recent film with Phocus Video Talking and Walking Common Ground received a 2023 Silver Telly Award in the category of diversity and inclusion.
Since retiring, Taylor has focused on writing and photography and has published work in Delmarva Review, Burning Word, Zocalo, Slackwater and regional magazines and newspapers. In 2018 Taylor published Listening In: Echoes and Artifacts from Maryland’s Mother County (George F. Thompson Publisher) a book of photographs and stories. Her upcoming book Making a Way Out of No Way: Lives of Labor, Love and Resistance will be released by New Village Press in Spring 2024.
