Astra Taylor

Astra Taylor (born September 30, 1979) is a Canadian-American documentary filmmaker, writer, activist, and musician. She is a fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation for her work on challenging predatory debt practices.

Life 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; at the university she studied Deleuze and Guattari under Ronald L. Bogue.

Taylor enrolled at Brown University, where she attended classes for a year before dropping out. Taylor completed a Master of Arts in liberal studies at The New School. 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 City.

Her book The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction at the 2024 Governor General's Awards. The book was also a finalist for the 2024 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

Activism Taylor was active in the Occupy movement and was the co-editor of Occupy!: An OWS-Inspired Gazette with Sarah Leonard and Keith Gessen. 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. Taylor is a co-founder of Debt Collective, a debtors' union fighting to cancel debts.

Taylor has resisted the label "activist" in her writing. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and on the Progressive International council. She supports a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers and literary festivals. She was an original signatory of the manifesto "Refusing Complicity in Israel's Literary Institutions".

In 2026, Taylor endorsed Avi Lewis in that year's federal NDP leadership race.

Works

Film Zizek!, 2005 Examined Life, 2008 What Is Democracy?, 2018

Writing Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers (editor), The New Press, 2009, Occupy!: Scenes From Occupied America (co-editor with Keith Gessen), Verso Books, 2012, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, Henry Holt and Company, 2014, "The faux-bot revolution", in A Field Guide to The Future of Work, Royal Society of Arts Future Work Centre, 2018 Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone, Metropolitan Books, 2019, Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition (foreword), Haymarket Books, 2020, Remake the World: Essays, Reflections, Rebellions, Haymarket Books, 2020, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (CBC Massey Lectures), House of Anansi Press, 2023,