In her 2011 TED talk, noted theater, opera, and film director Julie Taymor describes her artistic process. She explains:

I start with the notion of the ideograph. An ideograph is like a brush painting, a Japanese brush painting. Three strokes, you get the whole bamboo forest. I go to the concept of The Lion King and I say, what is the essence of it? What is the abstraction? If I were to reduce this entire story into one image, what would it be? The circle. The circle. It’s so obvious. The circle of life. The circle of Mufasa’s mask. The circle that, when we come to Act II and there’s a drought, how do you express drought? It’s a circle of silk on the floor that disappears into the hole in the stage floor. The circle of life comes in the wheels of the gazelles that leap. And you see the mechanics. And being a theatre person, what I know and love about the theatre is that when the audience comes in and they suspend their disbelief...I love the apparent truth of theatre. I love that people are willing to fill in the blanks. The audience is willing to say, Oh, I know that’s not a real sun. You took pieces of sticks. You added silk to the bottom. You suspended these pieces. You let it fall flat on the floor. And as it rises with the strings, I see that it’s a sun. But the beauty of it is that it’s just silk and sticks. (“Julie Taymor: Spider-man” 2011)

Taymor’s gift is her ability to take silk, sticks, and string and create magical worlds that transport audiences to faraway places. To imaginary realms. To other worlds. Taymor’s gift is that she makes magic happen.

Julie Taymor was born on December 15, 1952, the youngest of the four daughters of Betty Bernstein Taymor, an activist in Democratic politics, and Melvin Taymor (d. 1997), a gynecologist. Raised in a secular Jewish household in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, she studied theater from age ten at the Boston Children’s Theater and, during her final year of secondary school, at the Theater Workshop of Boston, where director Julie Portman focused on experimental ensemble creation. During high school, Taymor also spent a summer traveling in Sri Lanka and India, getting her first taste of what would later become a serious involvement in traditional Asian theater.

Following high school, Taymor spent a year in Paris studying at L’Écôle de Mime Jacques LeCoq. She graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio in June 1974. While attending Oberlin, she earned credits away from the college, apprenticing with experimental theater companies in New York and taking anthropology classes at Columbia University. Her main focus at Oberlin was a theater group run by Herbert Blau, which developed performance projects through ensemble workshops. Taymor credits Blau with helping to shape much of her ongoing approach to performance.

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Over the years, Taymor’s work has garnered practically every award in American theater. She received Villager Theater Awards for the sets and puppets in The Haggadah and for direction in Way of Snow; Maharam Theater Design Citations for Way of Snow and Tirae; Obie (“Off-Broadway”) Awards for Transposed Heads and Juan Darién; an Emmy award for costumes in Oedipus Rex; and the International Classical Music Award, 1994, for Oedipus Rex. For The Lion King, she received a Tony Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Drama Desk Awards for direction, costume design, and (with Michael Curry) puppet design; Tony Awards for direction and costumes; a (British) Olivier award for costumes; and (French) Molière Awards for costumes and best musical. Her film Frida earned Academy awards for best score and best makeup.

In 1990 Taymor received both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the first Dorothy Chandler Performing Arts Award in Theater. In 1992 she was granted a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1999 the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio mounted a retrospective of Taymor’s work. The exhibition subsequently appeared at The National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington D.C.) and the Field Museum (Chicago).