Gerrad Alex Taylor
Assistant Professor · Tenure-Track
College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
He/Him/His/Himself
About
Gerrad Alex Taylor (he/him/his) is an award-winning director and multidisciplinary theatre artist based out of the Greater Baltimore region and an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.In 2021 he was named one of Baltimore’s “40 Under 40” by the Washington Business Journal. In 2020, he founded Chesapeake Shakespeare’s Black Classical Acting Ensemble (BCAE), an affinity space for black actors interested in training and exposure of the “classics” and what an expansion of the classical canon may look like today. In 2024, Gerrad joined colleague Lizzi Albert to take on the roles of Co-Artistic Directors of Perisphere Theater in Montgomery County, MD. He has worked as an actor, director and educator for theaters and educational institutions across the country, centering his work on creating space that preserves and celebrates the history and culture of the Global Majority.
He holds a BA in Neuroscience from the Johns Hopkins University and an MFA in Performance from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Much of his work has been seen at the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, Perisphere Theater, Great River Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare Festival St. Louis, Pacific Conservatory Theatre-PCPA, Children’s Theatre of Annapolis, Everyman Theatre, Constellation Theatre Company, Mosaic Theatre Company, Arena Stage, Studio Theatre, and Washington Stage Guild. He is a member of the Actors’ Equity Association and an Advanced Actor Combatant with the Society of American Fight Directors.
Research interests
My research centers around the creation of space that preserves and celebrates the history and culture of the Global Majority. Today it has become of increasing importance to the socio-economical and political states of the communities we live in to ask questions about the “universally” accepted history we’ve been taught and its impact on the current state of our society and interpersonal relationships. I believe that the theatre arts, the medium in which I work, has a large responsibility in fostering dialogue that challenges our ideas of the world as we know it and reveals aspects of history and culture that have been forgotten, erased, elided, stolen and misrepresented. Theatre is a medium that teaches empathy through building relationships between storytellers, witnesses, and the story itself. In my work as a storyteller through the dramatic form, I look back to the original storytellers of the Griots and Djellis of Historical Africa and pull from their models of being repositories of tradition, legal advisors, and cultural mediators.Teaching interests
Consistently and rigorously making an effort to uncover the “wonder of theatre” by acknowledging that theatre is a moral instrument whose function is to "civilize, increase sensitivity, heighten perception, …and to ennoble the mind and uplift the spirit” (Jean Benedetti). In this investigation of theatre, it is also important to acknowledge the land on which we create and those from which this land was stolen. It is important to acknowledge the fact that the structures of wealth within which we work were built on the backs of enslaved Africans and African Americans. In doing so, we make a commitment to amplifying experiences and expressions that have often been marginalized, elided, appropriated, or erased.Education
- MFA, Performance — University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2013)
- BA, Neuroscience — The Johns Hopkins University (2010)