Regina Taylor

A versatile actress, Taylor began her acting career in college after she was offered a part on the CBS made-for-TV movie Crisis at Central High. From there, her success took off and she found herself enjoying a prolific creative life. In the '80s, she honed her craft off-Broadway and on Broadway, with performances in productions of As You Like It, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. While pursuing theater gigs, she made her film debut with a small role as a parent in the Morgan Freeman drama Lean on Me. In the '90s, she made an impression with her pivotal role as a conflicted nanny on the critically acclaimed Civil Rights-era drama I'll Fly Away, earning Golden Globe and Emmy nods for her lauded performance. The silver screen also beckoned, and after a small role in the custody drama Losing Isaiah, she played domestic characters in the crime drama The Keeper, the military drama Courage Under Fire, and the drama A Family Thing. Meanwhile, she continued to write and saw a pair of one-act plays, Watermelon Rinds and Jeanine’s Diary, produced by the Actors Theatre of Louisville, the start of a dynamic playwriting career. In the ‘00s, she focused her attention mainly on the stage, churning out Crowns, Drowning Crow, A Night in Tunisia, Oo-Bla-Dee and The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove. Though her focus was on theater, she remained on TV with supporting roles as a college president on the short-lived CBS series The Education of Max Bickford and then as a supportive wife of a military man on CBS’s The Unit. In 2009, her play, Magnolia, premiered at the famed Goodman Theater in Chicago, where she served as part of the Goodman Artistic Collective. A year later, she wrote Rain, about an emotional homecoming, and then took to the small screen as an FBI agent helping to locate a missing child on the Lifetime made-for-TV movie Who is Clark Rockefeller? When not busy writing and performing, she pursues various creative endeavors and avidly supports the nonprofits Soldiers’ Angel and the Jenesse Center.