Ciara
Ciara Taylor is an artist, educator, and cultural strategist whose work weaves together sacred expression and collective action in the struggle for the liberation of the poor and dispossessed. She currently serves as the Director of Culture, Faith, and Organizing at the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, where she develops cultural resources, curriculum, and faith-rooted networks that reimagine our moral practice and creative responsibilities in the face of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism, and religious nationalism.
Ciara is a founding leader of Songs in the Key of Resistance (SKOR), a cross-movement collective and gathering of artists, organizers, community and faith leaders on the frontlines of struggle through songs and storytelling. Ciara is also a minister with the Freedom Church of the Poor, a spiritual home for communities in struggle. Her artistic and ministerial projects include Songs in the Key of Resistance: A Movement Songbook, “Power in the Air”, We Do Not Move Alone: Songs, Chants, Poems, Prayers, and Artwork to be Used in the Call for Ceasefire on Gaza and a Free Palestine”, “Voices of Resistance”, and as a contributor to We Cry Justice: Liturgies of the Freedom Church of the Poor (2025). In 2018, Ciara served as the Director of National Partnerships with the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and as an inaugural fellow of Technology, Innovation, and Digital Engagement Lab (TIDEL)– housed at Union Theological Seminary and Sabbath Innovation Lab with Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s 1001 New Worshipping Communities 2024-2025.
Ciara began her activism as a high school student organizing against the Iraq War, a path that would lead her to co-found the Dream Defenders in 2012 after the killing of Trayvon Martin. As the organization’s Political Director and later Director of Political Consciousness, she helped shape a new generation of freedom fighters committed to the spiritual, cultural, and political work of liberation. Her story and the origins of the Dream Defenders were recently featured in HBO’s Eyes on the Prize III: We Who Believe in Freedom (Episode 6, “What Comes After Hope? 2008–2015”).
Through every role she inhabits— as a seasoned facilitator and visionary leader— Ciara invites others to imagine and build what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to as the Beloved Community, a world rooted in revolutionary love, justice, and belonging. Her work continues to empower artists and faith communities to wield art and culture as sacred practice in movement building, political education and leadership development—a means of healing, connection, and prophetic transformation.