Clyde Taylor
Clyde Russell Taylor (July 3, 1931 – January 24, 2024) was an American film scholar, writer, and cultural critic. He was an emeritus professor at New York University and focused his work on Black film and culture. He is best known for coining the term “L.A. Rebellion,” describing a group of African American filmmakers from UCLA in the 1970s who emphasized social realism and rejected Hollywood conventions.
Taylor taught at UC Berkeley, Stanford, Mills College, and Tufts University before joining New York University, where he remained in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Department of Africana Studies until his retirement in 2008. He wrote extensively and contributed to journals such as Black Film Review and Jump Cut. His book The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract – Film and Literature (IU Press, 1998) won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 1999. He also co-wrote the screenplay for Midnight Ramble, a PBS documentary about Oscar Micheaux released in 1995.
Taylor received numerous honors, including induction into the National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent by the Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center, the 1982 Callaloo Creative Writing Award for Non-Fiction Prose, an Indie Award from the Association of Independent Video and Film for cinema of people of color, the Richard Wright Award for Literacy Criticism from Black World, and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the NYU Center for Culture, Media and History, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Born in Boston, Taylor was the youngest of eight children of E. Alice Taylor and Frank Taylor. He attended The English High School and Howard University, earning his BA and MA in English. While at Howard, he studied with notable figures and under the guidance of professors like Alain LeRoy Locke, and he interacted with peers such as Amiri Baraka and Toni Morrison. He served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force, earning the rank of First Lieutenant and the National Defense Service Medal. He earned his Ph.D. in English from Wayne State University, with a dissertation on William Blake and the Ideology of Art.
Taylor married JoAnn Spencer in 1960, and they had two daughters, Shelley Zinzi Taylor and Rahdi Taylor; the couple divorced in 1970. In 1972 he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and married Martella Wilson, with whom he co-founded the African Film Society. They later separated in the mid-1990s, and Taylor moved to Manhattan in 1998 to work at NYU. He passed away in Los Angeles on January 24, 2024, at the age of 92.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 15:27 (CET).