Taylor Masamitsu (they/he), Ph.D., is a transdisciplinary scholar, educator, and artist working at the intersection of education policy, arts-based research, and cultural studies. They currently serve as Senior Director of Research & Evaluation at The Colton Institute at New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), where they lead applied, participatory, and arts-based research in education, art & health, and civic engagement. At Rutgers, Taylor is an affiliate of the Visual Studies in Education (ViSE) Research Lab and co-lead the Arts & Health Research Lab. Simultaneously, Taylor is leading a national cohort of teachers, scholars, and advocates in creating a framework to help teachers move to and through Illinois’s inclusive social science mandates.

Independently, Taylor uses their scholarship to center the political dimensions of education policy, queer and racialized experiences in schools and other sociopolitical institutions. Their doctoral research at UIUC produced queer-raciolinguistics—a theoretical framework bringing together political discourse, qualitative policy analysis, cultural studies, and agentic queer Asian America.