Meredith Jenks
New Yorkers know that one of the key elements of “getting lite” is constant motion. The Harlem-indebted dance style is all about seamlessly shifting from one move to the next, which homegrown New York dancers, like Harlem’s own Academy- and Grammy Award-nominated multihyphenate Teyana Taylor, understand requires thinking two or three steps ahead. And in a year that demanded her attention across music, film, fashion and motherhood, Taylor proved that she can still “get lite” with the best of them.
In August, she unveiled her cinematic album Escape Room, her first full-length release since her self-professed retirement from music in 2020. Accompanied by a 38-minute short film that corralled famous friends ranging from Oscar winner Regina King to South African pop sensation Tyla, Escape Room netted Taylor her first career Grammy nomination, nearly two decades after she made her Billboard chart debut with 2008’s “Google Me.”
The following month, she emerged as one of the breakout stars of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another — which won best picture and five other Oscars in March — with her nuanced performance illuminating the psyche of a revolutionary battling postpartum depression. Taylor picked up acting nominations at virtually every film awards ceremony of the season, winning the Golden Globe for best supporting actress in a motion picture.
“As dancers, it’s a pace that we move to; it’s a beat,” the 35-year-old muses on a rare day off after visiting her daughters and their classmates at school. “From how I move around a scene to how I walk onstage, even the beats that I catch when I’m on a red carpet, movement is embedded in everything that I do. People are surprised when I [movement coach] myself, but it’s just the choreographer in me. You know how certain people have comedic timing? I have ‘pocket timing’ for when things should move. Even how I hold my gun as Perfidia Beverly Hills [in One Battle After Another]. Dance plays a big part in everything that I do, even when it’s not super intentional.”
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At the turn of the decade, Taylor’s life and career looked very different. She released her third full-length, The Album, without much support from her label. “Until I’m free, until I can get [Def Jam] to release me, yes I want to retire. I don’t want to do this anymore,” she announced in a passionate Instagram Live near the end of 2020, temporarily closing a career chapter that brought the world contemporary R&B staples like 2018’s “Gonna Love Me.”
But Taylor had already prepared to pivot. Less than six months later, she joined the cast of A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, a gripping, Brooklyn-set drama about a single mother returning from Rikers Island to kidnap her son from the foster system and raise him herself. Taylor had spent most of the 2010s playing supporting roles in films such as Stomp the Yard: Homecoming and Madea’s Big Happy Family, but Rockwell’s feature directorial debut offered her star billing — and the space to come into her own as an actress.
“When you see that film, you can feel the sisterhood behind the lens. You can feel the safety and the protection,” Taylor reflects. “That was a project — and a moment within my journey and my faith walk — that I knew was special. I felt it. She pushed me, I pushed her, and we pushed each other. That’s what a great partnership is about. I will definitely be taking some of that knowledge up with me as I’m preparing to direct my first feature film. Transitioning from music videos to television and film is really exciting, and I give thanks to women — queens — like A.V. who showed me how to navigate it.”
The National Board of Review named Taylor’s portrayal of Inez de la Paz the best breakthrough performance of 2023, but that honor landed in the thick of monumental upheaval in her personal life. As she and Rockwell barreled through their first film awards season, Taylor was finalizing her divorce from former NBA player Iman Shumpert, whom she married in 2016 and shares daughters Junie, 10, and Rue Rose, 5, with. She dissects that emotional turmoil throughout Escape Room, which started as a short film and eventually spawned an accompanying studio album. True to her blunt, New York City roots, she straight-up told Def Jam, “If I do an album, it will be a soundtrack.”
From the melancholy, Lucky Daye-assisted “Hard Part” to the house-inflected “Long Time,” Escape Room is Taylor’s most sonically and thematically ambitious musical project to date — and it all came together under her directorial vision. Building on the visual album format popularized by Beyoncé, Taylor tapped fellow hip-hop visionary Missy Elliott to help executive-produce the Escape Room short film, which combines sleek, Afrofuturistic elements with visual nods to classic sci-fi films like Ex Machina and The Matrix.
“I had so much to talk about; I couldn’t put that in three minutes,” she says. “That’s how I felt as a music video director too; I was ready to move on to television and film because trying to consolidate stories into three-minute videos… I just can’t do it. And that’s how I felt in the music space as well. I love to write, but sometimes writing doesn’t always rhyme. It’s a feeling. So I tried to find the happy medium of my spoken word and my rhythms.”
Taylor developed the short film — which co-stars Rebel Ridge lead Aaron Pierre and Oscar nominee LaKeith Stanfield — alongside The Aunties, the all-female production company she co-founded with Coco Gilbert in 2017. In addition to providing various production services for artists, The Aunties manage a five-acre Atlanta lot equipped with dance, recording and prop studios, as well as countless pieces of equipment and 360-degree green-screen rooms. The company is a natural continuation of the path Taylor has charted for herself as an ever shape-shifting creative. She famously choreographed Beyoncé’s “Ring the Alarm” music video at just 15 years old, laying the foundation for her 2017 best choreography MTV Video Music Award win for Ye’s “Fade.”
Taylor created The Aunties out of necessity. She names the “whole ’90s/early 2000s era” as her creative North Star, specifically referencing pioneers across visual media like Elliott, Busta Rhymes, Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, Dave Meyers, Hype Williams, Quentin Tarantino and, of course, Paul Thomas Anderson. But coming up more than a decade later, Taylor had to work within tighter budgetary constraints — and she figured out a way to stretch those budgets to fit the scope of her vision. She shot the “Gonna Love Me” remix video for under $40,000, showing her label her capabilities as a director and producer. And the numbers proved it: When the music video dropped nearly a year after the song had, it propelled “Gonna Love Me” to an RIAA gold certification.
“That’s when I came up with ‘Spike Tee.’ I am spiking these numbers!” she says with trademark animation. “And I love Spike Lee, so it was a double entendre. People wanted to see and hear me. From there, baby, them budgets was getting better and better. And even though the budgets were getting heftier, I don’t spend just because it’s there. My goal as a director, especially wanting to be a movie director, is to know how to save money and not break the bank. I poured into others, and that was one of the things that also played a part in me being able to hold my head high as I navigated retirement from music. I really enjoy being behind the lens.”
As the only person in BET Awards history to win video director of the year each time she’s been nominated (2020 and 2023), her reimmersion into the world of film was practically preordained. Taylor joined the cast of One Battle After Another in early 2024, beginning filming as she was finishing up her Escape Room album and short film. As Perfidia Beverly Hills, Taylor stole the show — a firecracker performance that she achieved by channeling the heavy energy of her personal life and “color-coordinating” the emotional layers of her character.
“Me, singer Teyana, I’m a lover girl and a hopeless romantic. I’m Julia Roberts in the sense that I want the fairy tale,” Taylor says, dodging a call from the culinary school she’s currently attending (she enrolled last summer) that she’ll return later. “Perfidia doesn’t even cry; she is unapologetically selfish. I color-coordinated her layers so I could tell myself, ‘When you look back up, you will look up in red. You will look down at that baby in pink. You will walk out of the room smoke gray.’ By the time you hear the letter [she reads aloud] at the end, you feel the ombré of colors and hear a mother.”
Meredith Jenks
For those who have been following Taylor’s journey since her Harlem dance days (or her time on MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 or her 2010s GOOD Music stint), her 2025 was the culmination of two decades of work where she honed the tools to navigate several interlocked industries that bolt virtually every door shut when a Black woman is on the other side. From maneuvering out of label deals that didn’t serve her to smoothly hopping from one creative lane to the next, Taylor has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to honoring her own desires and needs — and to nurturing every artistic inclination she feels, passing or otherwise.
“Every time I had to retreat, God threw me back in the battlefield. But I realize that the battles are not punishment — they’re preparation for the victory,” she says. “God’s taking that smallest teddy bear from you because he has a bigger one behind his back to give you! You have to give yourself grace so there can be self-control. You also have to understand that you’re not going to always get it right. But everything that you do should be done with intention. That’s why I can do 20 million different things. There’s nothing wrong with trying, because you’re going to figure out what it is you want to do. We have to give ourselves the grace that we give our children.”
Now that awards season has ended — “I was living a double life [campaigning both projects], I felt like Hannah Montana living the best of both worlds!” — Taylor is shifting her focus to a packed slate of upcoming projects. Next up, she’ll star in 72 Hours, a Netflix comedy set for release this summer, and release a deluxe edition of Escape Room that will include extended mixes, more uptempo tracks and collaborations that weren’t quite ready for the album’s initial release. She’s also open to directing her own ensemble film, in which she’d like to see the “ ‘chef’s kiss’ ensembles” of Sinners and One Battle After Another join forces. “I need to see us make One Vampire After Another!”
On April 9, 2027, Get Lite, her feature directorial debut starring Emmy winner Storm Reid, will hit theaters worldwide under the Paramount banner. Executive-produced by Taylor, with both Reid and Kenya Barris also producing, Get Lite promises an NYC coming-of-age story rooted in the city’s subway dance scene. In a way, Taylor previewed this full-circle project by recording public service announcements for the New York City subway and bus systems in February. “I came across a TikTok of them playing my announcement, and I said, ‘Now why would y’all have my loud-ass voice bursting like that at 7 a.m.?’ It was loud coming through the TikTok!” she says in between boisterous laughs. “When I tell you, I bust out laughing! And to be very clear, I did not get paid to do that. I did that for the culture. I wouldn’t have even accepted money for that. That was for my hood.”
And as she gears up to dominate in the coming years, Billboard’s Women in Music Visionary has no plans to turn her volume down, whether she’s mastering a new creative field or helping fellow artists execute their grandest concepts.
“More is more; I never believed in less is more,” Taylor says. “Don’t tell me I’m too loud, because I’m going to be louder. Don’t tell me I’m too bold, because I’m going to be bolder!”
This story appears in the April 18, 2026, issue of Billboard.
