Julie Taymor won the 1998 Tony Award^® for Best Direction of a Musical and for Best Costumes for The Lion King. It also garnered Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Drama League Awards for Taymor’s direction; three Moliere Awards, including Best Musical and Best Costumes; and myriad awards for her original costume, mask and puppet designs. Taymor made her Broadway debut in 1996 with Juan Darien: A Carnival Mass (Lincoln Center), nominated for five Tony Awards.

Other theatre work includes M. Butterfly starring Clive Owen (Cort Theatre), Grounded (Public Theatre),The Green Bird (New Victory Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, the Cort Theatre on Broadway); Titus Andronicus; The Tempest; The Taming of the Shrew (Theatre for a New Audience); The Transposed Heads (Lincoln Center and American Music Theatre Festival); Liberty’s Taken (Castle Hill Festival); and Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark (Foxwoods Theatre on Broadway). Her opera productions include the Pulitzer finalist, Grendel, composed by Elliot Goldenthal (Los Angeles Opera and the Lincoln Center Festival); Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, in repertory at the Metropolitan Opera since 2004; and Oedipus Rex with Jessye Norman, conducted by Seiji Ozawa, for which she earned the International Classical Music Award for Best Opera Production and an Emmy^® for a subsequent film version. Her first film, “Fool’s Fire,” an adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, aired on PBS in 1992.

Her feature films include Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange; Frida, starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina (six 2002 Academy Award^® nominations, winning two); Across the Universe (2008 Golden Globe^®– nomination for Best Musical/Comedy); and The Tempest, starring Helen Mirren, Djimon Hounsou, Russell Brand and Ben Whishaw. She recently directed The Glorias, starring Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander, Bette Midler and Janelle Monae based on the life of Gloria Steinem, and completed a cinematic version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, filmed during her stage production that ran at Theatre for a New Audience’s new home in Brooklyn. Taymor has received a MacArthur “genius” Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Obie Awards, the first annual Dorothy B. Chandler Award in Theatre, 2015 Inductee to the Theatre Hall of Fame, among many others. A book spanning her career, Julie Taymor: Playing With Fire, is available from Abrams.