User:Wellington Bay/Deanne Taylor

Deanne Elizabeth Taylor (November 24, 1946 – December 15, 2020) was an avant garde artist based in Toronto. She is best known for founding and being a member of the Hummer Sisters, a satirical musical group. She also co-founded the theatre company called VideoCabaret and was involved in staging a number of plays. In 1989, she and her partner, Michael Hollingsworth, won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for their rock and roll adaptation of the opera called Rigoletto.

She is also well known for having run for Mayor of Toronto against Art Eggleton in 1982. She ran with the Hummer Sisters and changed her name to A. Hummer. Her campaign slogan was "ART vs Art". She came in second place with 12,000 votes.

Early life

Deanne Taylor was born in Berkeley, California. Her parents were living there while her father was attending the University of California. The family came back to Canada while she was still a child. When she was 9 years old, she starred in the CBC Television children's television series called Maggie Muggins, playing the lead character Maggie Mullins..

In the 1960s, she lived in London, England and was involved with the counterculture. She founded London's first repertory film house (a cinema that shows art films and classic movies), the Electric Cinema, with Roger Cross and John McWilliams. She hosted Jean-Luc Godard when the cinema showed One Plus One and had a small part in Godard's documentary British Sounds (See You at Mao), on the status of women under capitalism, in which she walked up and down a staircase in the nude.

Death

Taylor died on December 15, 2020, of cancer, at the age of 74.