Daily Inspiration: Meet Katherine Bourne Taylor

Today we’d like to introduce you to Katherine Bourne Taylor.

Hi Katherine, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
When I was eight, I was cast in the child chorus for a fancy opera – and fully picked my nose for most of my time on stage. An auspicious start to a career, to be sure. I grew up in Seattle and got my BFA in Acting at Southern Methodist University in Dallas (to answer your question, yes, they are very different places from each other). Instead of immediately moving to LA or New York upon graduation, I stayed in Dallas for a few years because I was getting opportunities there to play characters that excited me. It was also in Dallas that I found a group of collaborators and began making my own work for the first time as a young adult. I spent a summer in Chicago studying at The School at Steppenwolf. I always knew that acting was my path, but seeing it being done every day at such a high level was really inspiring, and a year later, I moved to Chicago to pursue the theatre scene there. It’s funny because I moved to Chicago to do gritty theatre work – but what I actually found traction in is film/television, as well as character-based comedy. I think what helped is allowing myself to be led by curiosity, rather than a fear I wouldn’t be good at it. And a desperation to just be performing. This intersection between theatre and film began with “Cool For Five Seconds”, a short play I performed with my best friend at a showcase to get-you guessed it – agents.

After performing, our team met again to talk about turning the play into a short film, something none of us had ever done before. Once we began preproduction, I realized that the act of making a film is so creatively fulfilling, and our team of women threw ourselves into making something we could be proud of. Fast forward three years to being selected by over 20 festivals, winning Grand Prize at Best of the Midwest Awards, and premiering on the Omeleto platform on YouTube, where you can watch anytime. I moved to Los Angeles a year and a half ago because my focus is film/tv, and I want to be where I can have my best shot at doing that full time. Since moving here, I’ve been making my own films, auditioning, developing characters for sketches, shooting a commercial here and there, and really REALLY loving the fact that it never gets below 35 degrees. Pasadena has so much charm, and the fact that I can walk to the grocery store and coffee shop has kept me anchored in a tumultuous time. I live in a little Pasadena bungalow community, and my neighbors are all avid gardeners, so I’ve been learning from them how to really make my soil healthy and set up for success in the growing season. There is probably a metaphor in there for my life, but also, literally, I’m excited to plant some veggies this spring.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Anyone in the entertainment business knows that a thick skin is essential for this career path to be sustainable. Having that thick skin while still keeping your skin translucent so you can act from a place of vulnerability is a balancing act. Compartmentalization is key. It took a while for me to realize that making my own work when the work isn’t coming to me isn’t a sad second place – its’ actually a great privilege and incredibly empowering. Ultimately, I make a lot of my own work because I get so much joy out of the act of creating – shame just gets in the way. Using my individual voice to make something, whether it is a film, a play, or a silly character, is a habit that makes up over half of my portfolio now. I’ve also been doing it long enough that those projects are now what have started to get me into rooms where other people need to sign off on me.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m an actor and a filmmaker. I’ve also begun a styling side-hustle, helping actors get their looks together for headshots and editorial shoots. After years of working in theatre, film has become a really exciting new part of my “toolbox”. I try to keep the throughline of my work as honest, with a sense of humor, and hopefully honoring the complexities of being human – the beautiful and the ugly. I’m not interested in pretending that people are perfect or one dimensional – probably because I’ve felt a pressure in my own life to stay “on the surface” and put together, so the fight against that itself has become an important part of my work. I love sketch characters, and specifically, I’ve been performing “Grown Up Orphan Annie” for upwards of five years. She’s become my clown and also a voice for me to talk about my own existential anxieties. I also have a soft spot for “Maggie Mapleton”, an Australian housewife who dreams of being a podcaster that I’ve started playing with this year and posting on Instagram. “The Back Room Shakespeare Project” is a movement from Chicago that now has chapters in LA (of which I’m a stakeholder) and New York.

Plays are performed by serious actors, with two rehearsals, in a bar. Taking these plays back to the raucous environment they were written for while simultaneously honoring the importance of these works is a tightrope walk that I’m pretty addicted to. I truly can’t wait until we can perform again, safely. When the quarantine began in 2020, I wrote, shot, and acted in a short film called “Ships In The Night”. “Ships in the Night” follows a young woman coping with the beginning days of this pandemic by “shipping” two fictional, animated characters together (basically, she wants them to kiss). I collaborated with an animation studio in Chicago to design and animate the fictional characters the protagonist (played by me) becomes fixated on. This film represents the nerdy parts of myself that I have come to love, and it is my hope that through it, audience members will feel less shame about whatever strange thing they are into that gives them joy. We premiere at Beloit International Film Festival in February!

Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
Stories will save us. Engage in stories, tell your own. There are no dumb stories.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: http://www.katherine-bourne.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katherinebournetaylor/; FOR STYLING: https://www.instagram.com/kbtstyledme/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/kbournetaylor
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qIxRwCtIx4&t=2s
• Other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGE60l5sBXs&t=1s

Image Credits:
1 (Profile),2,3,5, 6,7: Photographer David Sprague . #6/7 is playing Rosalind in “As You Like It” with Back Room Shakespeare Los Angeles. 4: Joanna Degeneres 7/8: As Grown Up Orphan Annie. Photographer Carolyn Molloy 9: “Ships In The Night” poster, designed by Sarah Cruz
Photographer: Paper & Fabric Studio @paperandfabricstudio on Instagram, and Makeup: Art Ash, @artash on Instagram