Jane Taylor was a South African writer, playwright and academic. She held the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Aesthetic Theory and Material Performance at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. She was the convenor of the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects (LoKO) which engages in performance as well as research and intellectual enquiry into the human and technological interface, the puppet, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Intelligence Amplification (IA). Her performance/lecture “Ne’er So Much the Ape” explored the articulation of primate research, race theory, AI, and performance theory.