Johanna K. Taylor is a hybrid scholar and arts administrator whose work explores how artists and designers collaboratively expand democratic actions in arts institutions, civic systems, and urban spaces.

Taylor holds an MA in Arts Management from Carnegie Mellon University, a PhD in Public and Urban Policy from The New School. She was a Creative Cities Fellow at Stanford University, Senior Cultural Policy Fellow at the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, served as a Fulbright Specialist, is on the cultural policy committee for Grantmakers in the Arts, and is an advisor for the global social impact media start-up borderless. She currently is Associate Professor at Arizona State University and program director of MA program in Creative Enterprise and Cultural Leadership.

In her research she asks how arts-led engagement unites stakeholders to shape policy and innovate new ways of working to co-create equitable, shared futures. Arts in cross-sectoral collaboration is one focus of this work, recognizing the potential of arts and culture to expand ways of working and develop new ideas that can respond to the critical issues of our time. This research has focused on artists embedded in government, looking at the trend of artists in residence in government programs expanding across the US. This work has been published in Cultural Trends and the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society among other journals. Her book The Art Museum Redefined: Power, Opportunity, and Community Engagement (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) explores museums disrupting organizational hierarchies by sharing decision making power with artists and communities.

She is co-founder of CAIR Lab (Cross-sector Artists in Residence Lab) a creative agency that mixes applied research and arts practice in collaboration with government staff, artists, and communities to focus on the systems change potential of artists embedded in government. CAIR Lab has produced creative tools to shape cross-sector collaborations with artists, written articles for Next City and the American Planning Association, and implemented a National Endowment for the Arts grant with Smart Growth America.

As an arts administrator she worked at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, BRIC Arts|Media, and A Blade of Grass among other organizations. In these roles she collaboratively launched an Art and Social Justice learning cohort, organized an international art prize for Art and Politics, and turned a physical slide library of Brooklyn artists into an accessible online forum. Each project involved engaging with staff across departments, community stakeholders, and artists to cocreate programs grounded in local relevance.