Astra Taylor
 "Utopian Potential of the Internet": Astra Taylor on How to Take Back Power & Culture in Digital Age, Democracy Now, April 25, 2014 |
Astra Taylor (born 1979) is a Canadian-American documentary filmmaker, writer, activist and musician.
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Taylor grew up in Athens, Georgia, and was unschooled until age 13 when she enrolled in ninth grade. At 16 she abandoned high school to attend classes at the University of Georgia, which she only stayed at for a year before heading to Brown University. She attended classes there for a year and dropped out when she realized that "unschooling" was a lifelong commitment. Taylor has taught sociology at the University of Georgia and SUNY New Paltz. Her writings have appeared in numerous magazines, including Dissent,n+1,Adbusters,The Baffler,The Nation,Salon, and The London Review of Books.
Taylor is the sister of painter and disability activist Sunny Taylor, and is married to Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel. She joined Neutral Milk Hotel onstage for a number of shows in 2013 and 2014, playing guitar and accordion. She is a vegan. She lives in New York.
Taylor was active in the Occupy Movement and was the co-editor of Occupy!: An OWS-Inspired Gazette with Sarah Leonard of Dissent magazine and Keith Gessen of n+1. The broadsheet covered Occupy Wall Street in five issues over the course of the first year of the occupation and was later anthologized by Verso Books. She was also a founder of Rolling Jubilee, a Strike Debt project, which to date has relieved $39 million in debt since 2011 by crowd-sourcing funds and purchasing debt.
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