Founder and principal of kthread, Kristen Taylor is a digital artist and scholar living in Miami, Florida. She holds a BA in English from Davidson College and an MA in American Studies in English from the University of Virginia; her digital MA thesis is on orphan trains.

Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Virginia (degree expected 2009), her dissertation research is on niche online networks of local food, currency, and shelter. She has taught courses in 18th and 19th century literature, modernist literature, media studies, and a writing course on food. She has also designed and taught advanced web design and theory seminars.

Ms. Taylor works as the Online Community Manager for the Knight Foundation. Previously, she worked as the Associate Director for Content and Social Media at PBS Interactive, and on the nora Project (text-mining XML in humanities databases), the NINES project (digitizing nineteenth century resources), the Walt Whitman Archive, and the redesigning of iris magazine’s Web site (publishing an article encouraging the young feminist readership to exercise their cyberfemininity).

Her sister Kassandra Taylor is a dancer, singer, and choreographer with a degree from Point Park University currently training with LINES Ballet in San Francisco. Her sister Katrina Taylor is a documentary filmmaker and activist who has worked for the Discovery Channel Global Education Partnership and managed the Elon College Digital Editing Lab; Katrina’s award-winning documentary A Measure of Our Humanity about AIDS in Namibia has been screened at multiple film festivals and is used by the Peace Corps to educate volunteers about Namibia. Her cousin Ryan Taylor is an acclaimed baritone, and her aunt Pamela Aiken is an Atlanta jewelry designer exhibiting in the Lambert Gallery of Art.

In the twenty-first century, Kristen has also directed computer camps, managed hospital databases, marketed directly, taught high school, and made half of an earth sandwich for Ze Frank.

When not commandeering someone’s kitchen or practicing Bikram yoga, she enjoys long, moonlit strolls through the CSS Zen Garden with her MacBook Pro, dual-booting Toshiba, and Mac Cube.