Theatre Artist

Taylor Mac is a MacArthur fellow, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, a Tony nominee for Best Play, and the recipient of the International Ibsen Award.

Selected works include: Bark of Millions (a rock opera meditation on queerness); Joy and Pandemic (a realism play about an abstract art school); The Hang (a Passion Play/jazz opera about the final hours of Socrates, with lyrics by Mac and music by Matt Ray); The Fre (a queer children’s play set in a ball pit); Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (a tragedy determined to become a comedy); A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (a 24-hour performance art concert about community); Hir (an absurd realism play about changing America); The Walk Across America for Mother Earth (an anarchist adaptation of Three Sisters about activism, with music by Ellen Maddow); The Lily’s Revenge (a Noh inspired flowergory manifold about a flower who wants to be the center of the story, with music by Rachel Garniez); The Young Ladies Of (a paternal mystery); The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac (a ukulele confessional about the war on terror); Red Tide Blooming (a freak-show musical about gentrification); The Last Two People on Earth (a two-man cabaret for seagulls about the joy of singing, created with Mandy Patinkin, Susan Stroman, and Paul Ford).

Films include Whitman in the Woods (directed by Noah Greenberg, streaming on All Arts) and Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music (a concert doc directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, streaming on Max).

Pianist, Vocalist, Arranger, Composer, & Songwriter

Matt Ray is an Obie Award winning theater-maker, composer, pianist, singer, songwriter, arranger, and music director. His arrangements have been called “wizardly” (Time Out NY) and “ingenious” (NY Times), and his piano playing referred to as “classic, well-oiled swing” (NY Times) and “to cry for” (Ebony). For his work on Taylor Mac’s show A 24-Decade History of Popular Music he and Mac shared the 2017 Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired By American History. He and Mac’s jazz-based theater piece The Hang opened to rave reviews in January of 2022, and won Matt a 2023 Obie Award for Music Direction and Composition. The show also received 4 Drama Desk and 2 Drama League nominations including a Drama Desk nomination for Matt Ray for Best Music.

Matt’s latest collaboration with Taylor Mac, the rock opera Bark of Millions, premiered at the Sydney Opera House in October 2023 to great acclaim. For this 4 hour and 20 minute ensemble driven rock opera, Matt is composer, music director, and performer in the show. The U.S. East Coast premiere of the show was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater in February of 2024, and the West Coast premiere was at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, also in February of 2024. The European premiere will be at the Berliner Festspiele in Berlin, Germany in October of 2024.

Notable live performances include playing at Carnegie Hall with Kat Edmonson, playing the Hollywood Bowl with reggae legend Burning Spear, and touring the Caribbean and Central America with his piano trio as a US Department of State Jazz Ambassador. His show Matt Ray Plays Hoagy Carmichael featuring Kat Edmonson premiered at Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series in 2018. Other work includes music directing Queen Esther’s The Billie Holiday Project at the Apollo Theater’s Music Cafe in Harlem (2012), Lincoln Center with Joey Arias (2015), Edinburgh Fringe with Lady Rizo (2012), music directing Taylor Mac’s Obie award winning play The Lily’s Revenge at the HERE Arts Center in New York (2009), and co-writing songs for and performing in Bridget Everett’s one-hour Comedy Central special Gynecological Wonder (2015) as well as Everett’s hit show Rock Bottom (2014).

Taylor Black is Associate Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Mosaic Fellows Program and Initiative, an undergraduate Arts and Humanities Initiative at Duke. He specializes in 20th Century American Literature, Popular Culture, and Queer Theory.  He is currently working on two new projects: Cult of Personality: An American Romance, on the American fascination with cults and cult leaders, and Butterfly on the Wheel, a critical biography of Quentin Crisp and the cultural history of New York’s Downtown Arts scene during the 1980s. Black is the author of the 2023 book Style: A Queer Cosmology (NYU Press).