Ciara Taylor

Ciara Taylor is an educator, artist, and movement strategist shaped by prophetic traditions that arise wherever people in struggle remember themselves and refuse erasure. Her work lives at the crossroads of culture, faith, and liberation, grounded in the belief that ending poverty requires developing and uniting leaders of the poor and dispossessed across lines of historic division. Guided by the conviction that movements need more than ideology alone—that they require song, ritual, memory, and moral courage as a part of our strategy—she draws from Black freedom movements, interfaith justice lineages, and grassroots organizing to help communities tell the truth about power and practice the world they are organizing to bring into being.

She serves as Director of Culture, Faith, and Organizing at the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, where she works alongside organizers, artists, and faith leaders to unsettle stories that bless violence and inequality. There, she tends the spiritual and cultural life of movements—crafting curriculum, shaping ritual, and strengthening faith-rooted networks confronting racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism, and religious nationalism.

Ciara is a founding member and cultural organizer with Songs in the Key of Resistance (SKOR), a movement song collective that carries the music of struggle across generations—as inheritance, medicine, and invitation. She is also a movement minister with the Freedom Church of the Poor, a spiritual home without walls where people in struggle author their own prayers, shape their own rituals, and claim their lives as sacred testimony—good news to the poor and a living vision of the Beloved Community on earth.

Her notable projects include “Songs in the Key of Resistance: A Movement Songbook”, “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”, “Power in the Air”, and as a contributor to We Pray Freedom: Liturgies and Rituals from the Freedom Church of the Poor (2025).  Across this work, Ciara wields song, prayer, history, visual art, and poetry as technologies of resistance—ways to grieve what has been taken, remember what has been taught, and organize what must be transformed.

Her political formation began as a high school student organizing against the Iraq War and deepened through the co-founding of the Dream Defenders in 2012. As Political Director and later Director of Political Consciousness, she helped shape an organizing tradition rooted in moral clarity, historical memory, and disciplined love. Her work—and the origins of the Dream Defenders—are featured in HBO’s Eyes on the Prize III: We Who Believe in Freedom (Episode 6, What Comes After Hope? 2008–2015).

Guided by the belief that liberation is both a moral demand and a collective practice, Ciara works with movements to remember what they know, raise their voices in song and ritual to break isolation, and organize as if another world is not only possible—but calling us into being together.