Taylor-Wood Sam : artist

Samantha “Sam” Taylor-Wood (born March 4, 1967) is an English filmmaker, photographer and conceptual artist. Her directorial feature film debut was the 2009 Nowhere Boy, a film based on the childhood experiences of The Beatles songwriter and singer John Lennon.

Samantha Taylor, was born in Croydon, England. Writing in The Telegraph, journalist Anna van Praag said Taylor-Wood was born “to a yoga-teacher and astrologist mother, Taylor-Wood’s biker father left when she was nine. It prompted her mother to enroll the family in a commune in Sussex, where they wore orange robes and took Sanskrit names, all of which Taylor-Wood hated.”

Taylor-Wood began exhibiting fine art photography in the early-1990s. One collaboration with Henry Bond, titled 26 October 1993, featured Bond and Taylor-Wood pastiching the roles of Yoko Ono and John Lennon in the manner of the photo-portrait made—by photographer Annie Leibovitz—a few hours before Lennon was assassinated, in 1980. In 1994, she exhibited a multi-screen video work titled Killing Time, in which four people mimed to an opera score. From that point multi-screen video works became the main focus of Taylor-Wood’s work. Beginning with the video works Travesty of a Mockery and Pent-Up in 1996. Taylor-Wood was nominated for the annual Turner Prize in 1998, but lost out to the painter Chris Ofili. She won the Illy Café Prize for Most Promising Young Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale. In 2002, Taylor-Wood was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to make a video portrait of David Beckham—whom she depicted sleeping. She is perhaps best known for her work entitled ‘Crying Men’ which features many of Hollywood’s glitterati crying, including Robin Williams, Sean Penn, Laurence Fishburne, and Paul Newman.