Maggie Taylor is an artist who lives the edge of a sun-drenched prairie populated by cows, alligators and birds on the outskirts of Gainesville, Florida. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1961, and moved to Florida at the age of 11. In 1983 she received a philosophy degree from Yale University, and in 1987, a master's degree in Fine Art, studying photography, from the University of Florida.She began her career focusing on still life, a subject she still returns to in a reimagined form. Since 1996 she developed her practice around the manipulation of photography to create original digital compositions using Photoshop and other programs. She was, for a time, married to Jerry Uelsmann, an early exponent of photomonage in America. In 1995, Adobe's creative director tried to convince Uelsmann to try out Photoshop. He didn't like it, but Maggie embraced it as the main tool in creating her surrealist work. Breaking new ground, she became a pioneer on the field of digital arts. Maggie Taylor's work is featured in Adobe Photoshop Master Class: Maggie Taylor's Landscape of Dreams, published by Adobe Press in 2005. The medium has provided a way in which to marry personal recollection with an imagined world. She draws from other magic story tellers such as Anderson, Lewis Carol and the Brothers Grimm. Layering and manipulating imagery, texture and color fields, it is a process of addition and reduction which draws on the principals of painting. At its heart though, it is still an art form based in photography. Elements are collected through scans of old photos and materials or photography directly taken by the artist. The resulting images appear to be impossible snap shots outside of time and reality of in an impossible world. Her digital composites have been widely exhibited and have been collected by many museums including: The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; The George Eastman House, Rochester; Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville; Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas; The High Museum, Atlanta; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; The Art Museum, Princeton University; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; and The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara.