Marianne Taylor has been teaching folk dancing locally, nationally, and internationally for over fifty years. Her warmth and enthusiasm have inspired several generations of dancers. With “clarity and charity,” she has taught hundreds of school programs and residencies, Scottish and English country dance classes, and international folk dance workshops. She has been featured at Stockton’s University of the Pacific Camp, Mendocino Camp, Pinewoods Camp, and workshops in Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, Australia and Switzerland and from British Columbia to Newfoundland in Canada.

Marianne graduated from Sargent College, Boston University in 1951 with a B.S. in Physical Education and a minor in Dance. She received her teacher’s certification in Scottish Country Dance from the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society in 1957, and the RSCDS Scroll of Honour in 2005. In the mid-1950s, she and Conny Taylor started running weekly international folk dance classes in the Boston area. She co-founded the Folk Arts Center of New England with Conny in 1975 and served as its Program Director through 2004.

Since 1995 Marianne has been a member of the Ralph Page Legacy Committee of the New England Folk Festival Association and a committee member for the Ralph Page Dance Legacy Weekend. Recently she has been an Artist in Residence for primary, middle and high school programs through the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. She is the recipient of the Boston Dance Alliance’s 2007 Dance Champion Award in recognition of her immeasurable contribution to recreational folk dancing in the Boston area. In 2008, the National Folk Organization honored her with its Preserving Our Heritage Award.

Marianne has played piano for contra, Scottish, and other kinds of dance since the early 1950s and is a regular member of the Scottish dance band Tullochgorum. She plays monthly with the Lamprey River Band at a contra dance in Dover, NH, and is sometimes a musician and sometimes the caller at the Deerfield Town Hall Contra Dances, which she has organized since 1991. She also plays regularly with the Strathspey and Reel Society of New Hampshire and several other groups. She appears as backup on several Scottish/Celtic music CDs. These include:

Marianne’s latest interests have included leading a small group tour in Portugal, helping to organize a second concert tour in Scotland with the Strathspey and Reel Society of New Hampshire, and playing piano for a Scottish dance tour on a schooner in the Greek Islands.