HART Executive Director Steve Lloyd stepped out onstage to announce that Taylor was being awarded the theater’s highest honor, the Career Achievement Award. The recognition celebrates not a single work, but decades of service to the Waynesville theater company.

Taylor became involved with HART in the 1980s and performed as one of the theater’s most popular actresses in: Night of Jan. 16, The Nerd, Witness for the Prosecution, Blithe Spirit, Deathtrap, Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Lion in Winter, Shirley Valentine, A Password to Murder, The Grapes of Wrath, and Love Letters. 

In the mid-1990s Taylor began directing. Over the past 25 years, Taylor directed Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, Broadway Bound, The Member of the Wedding, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,  Talley’s Folly, The Little Foxes, Plaza Suite, Twelve Angry Men, Welcome to Mitford, Lost in Yonkers, Ah! Wilderness, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Nerd, and Harvey.

Over the past 20 years, HART has only recognized eight other individuals with this honor. 

Past winners are: Reta Scribner, Lloyd Kay, Allison Stinson, John Winfield, Suzanne Tinsley, Barbara Bates Smith, Tom Dewees and Bob Baldridge.