Listen: LITTLE KNOWN FACTS with Ilana Levine and Special Guest, Actor and Playwright Regina Taylor

Little Known Facts is a weekly podcast hosted by stage and film actress Ilana Levine. With over 150 interviews to date with today's most successful artists, Levine engages her celebrity guests in intimate conversations that are hilarious, vulnerable, revealing and inspiring. Ilana's unique brand of celebrity interview has been called "Podcast Vérité," because her conversations are unfiltered, raw, honest and uniquely funny.

Today's episode features actress/director/playwright/educator/activist Regina Taylor. She is the playwright-in-residence at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, a three-year appointment through the National Playwright Residency Program established by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and HowlRound Theatre Commons. Taylor is also writing new plays for Audible and for Southern Methodist University (the black album, about what it is to be Black in 2020).

How did she come to be an artist? "My mother is an artist and she taught me to be an artist. From the age of four, playing on the floor with crayons and construction paper, creating my own children's books," Taylor explains. "Even before I thought I might be, I was was creating. It was very mindful on her part- she was a teacher. She wanted to empower me with writing my own narrative in this world."

Taylor's playwright credits include Bread (Edgerton Award, WaterTower Theatre); Crowns (four Helen Hayes Awards, including Best Director); Oo-Bla-Dee (Steinberg-ATCA award); Drowning Crow (Broadway, Manhattan Theatre Club); The Trinity River Plays (Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award); and stop.reset. (Signature Theatre Residency 5). Taylor received the Denzel Washington Endowed Chair in Theatre at Fordham University at Lincoln Center. An artistic associate of Goodman Theatre, Taylor is its most produced playwright.

Taylor is featured in Netflix's All Day and a Night starring Jeffrey Wright and Ashton Saunders and directed/written by Joe Robert Cole (writer for Black Panther), and guest stars on COUNCIL OF DADS (NBC), THE RED LINE (producer Ava DuVernay, CBS), The Good Fight, and LOVECRAFT COUNTRY (producers Jordan Peele, J. J. Abrams and Misha Green). For her television role as Lily Harper in I'll Fly Away, Taylor received a Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress, three NAACP IMAGE AWARDS and two Emmy Award nominations.

Her other television roles include The Unit. Taylor was the first African American lead in Masterpiece Theatre's Cora Unashamed, starred as Anita Hill in HBO's Strange Justice (Gracie Award), and was featured in A Good Day to Die starring Sidney Poitier. She has co-starred in USA Network's Dig and guest starred in Elementary and The Black List. Taylor's film credits include Saturday Church, The Negotiator, Courage Under Fire, Clockers, and Lean on Me. Taylor was also the first Black woman to play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet on Broadway.