Heather Taylor

Heather Taylor is a Canadian writer, director, and performer born in Edmonton, Alberta. Her training spans music, acting, and writing, undertaken in western Canada and London, England. Early in her career, Taylor appeared on Broadway in 1965 in The Roar of the Greasepaint - The Smell of the Crowd.

As a poet, Taylor has performed at venues across the United Kingdom, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Poetry Café, RADA, the Camberwell Arts Festival, the Harrow Festival, the Runnymede International Literature Festival, Glastonbury Festival, Spit Lit, Borders, and Penned in the Margins. She has also appeared at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol and The Guardian Newsroom as part of the Remember Ken Saro-Wiwa project, and has been a member of both Apples and Snakes and Malika's Poetry Kitchen. Between 2005 and 2007, Taylor toured a two-woman poetry and music show, Accents on Words, with Aoife Mannix. The show launched at the Poetry Café in London in November 2005 and was performed at venues including the British Library with BBC Radio London, BAC with Apples and Snakes, the Aran Islands in Ireland, and India with the British Council for Mumbai Poetry Live. In December 2007, Taylor participated in the first Belgrade International Poetry Festival. Her poetry collections include Horizon and Back, published by Tall Lighthouse in the UK in 2005, and Sick Day Afternoons, published by Treci Trg in Serbia in 2009.

As a playwright, Taylor's work has been staged at the Tricycle Theatre, Soho Theatre, Greenwich Theatre, the Pleasance, Etcetera Theatre, and Theatre503 in London, as well as New Place in St. Albans and G12 in Glasgow as part of the New Writing New Worlds Festival. She holds an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from City University. Her play Prisms was broadcast as the Sunday Play on Resonance FM on December 16, 2010.

In 2008, Taylor co-wrote the Bengali western film The Last Thakur, a Channel 4 co-production distributed by Artificial Eye. The film premiered at the London Film Festival and screened at the Dubai International Film Festival, the Mumbai International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival, before its UK theatrical release on June 29, 2009. Sight and Sound magazine described it as one of the most confident British debut features since Asif Kapadia's The Warrior. Taylor also produced and co-directed the short documentary Wild West Dream through Red on Black Productions, which was an official selection at both the Atlantic Film Festival and the Edmonton International Film Festival in 2009. In 2011, she created the web series Raptured, distributed by Koldcast, and in 2012 released the food series Home Baked Stories. Taylor wrote and directed the short horror film Stitched in 2016, which was named among 20 notable works at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival that year. Her short film Pay to Stay premiered at the Queens World Film Festival in 2019.

From 2018 to 2019, Taylor was a resident of the Bell Media Prime Time TV Program at the Canadian Film Centre, presented in association with ABC Signature Studios. She served as a story editor on season two of The Hardy Boys and co-wrote two episodes: Conflicting Reports with Nile Seguin and A Midnight Scare with Laura Seaton. Taylor and Seaton received a nomination for a 2023 Writers Guild of Canada Screenwriting Award for the latter episode. During the fall of 2022, Taylor participated in the RespectAbility Entertainment Lab for entertainment professionals with disabilities. Taylor was a co-producer on season one of Revival and wrote episode 105, Triage, which aired on July 10, 2025.

Taylor co-created the podcast Anomaly with Hillary Nussbaum under their jointly founded company Cereal Made. The podcast was included in The Gotham Film and Media Institute's Audio Hub in September 2020 and was an official selection of Tribeca Festival's inaugural podcast program in 2021. In 2022, she co-created the podcast Braaains with her sister, film and television editor Sarah Taylor, exploring how film and television portray the workings of the brain and frequently featuring guests with lived experiences of mental illness and disabilities. Taylor also wrote and directed Breaking Up, an episode of James Kim's narrative fiction podcast You Feeling This, which had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival in 2023. On December 10, 2024, her debut audiobook Know Your Newlywed, co-written with Hillary Nussbaum, was published by Simon and Schuster. It was selected as one of Audible's best romance audiobooks of 2024 and received a Booklist Editors' Choice for Adult Audio designation for the same year.

Taylor served as Director of Creative Strategy at The Economist from 2015 to 2018 and has held executive roles at Weber Shandwick and Ogilvy. She was the North American Editorial Director for Econsultancy, Corporate Community Manager for the BBC, social media and PR manager for Giffgaff, and editor and filmmaker for PayPal's Let's Talk platform. In 2011, Brand Republic listed her among the top 200 most influential bloggers. That same year, Taylor organized the cleanup in Clapham Junction following the London Riots in August 2011, leading what became known as the Broom Army, and received a Wandsworth Community Champion award for her efforts.