DONALD TAYLOR BLACK was educated at Trinity College Dublin, where he was Chairman of Dublin University Players. He won an Arts Council bursary to train as a theatre director at the Abbey Theatre, and directed plays for the Peacock, the Project Arts Centre, the Irish Theatre Company and Gemini Productions. Subsequently he worked as a Film Selector/Programmer for the Cork Film Festival, Organiser/Programmer for the Celtic Film Festival and as a freelance writer for radio.

His films, predominantly documentaries, have been commissioned or transmitted by RTÉ, TG4, Channel 4, BBC, the ITV Network, Ulster Television, La Sept/ARTE, YLE, SBS, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, PBS stations in the United States and many other international broadcasters. They have won a number of awards and have been screened at the Chicago, Melbourne, Sydney, London, Taormina, Hong Kong, Augsburg, Wellington, Geneva, Dublin, Cork, Foyle and Celtic Film Festivals; at INPUT, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Cinémathèque Française, and as part of retrospectives throughout the world.

He was a board member of the Irish Film Institute, a founding member of Film Makers Ireland (now Screen Producers Ireland) and is a former Chairman of DOCUMENTARY, the Copenhagen-based project, which supported creative documentaries in Europe during the EUs first MEDIA Programme. Donald was Head of the Department of Film & Media at IADT (2001-2016) and Creative Director of The National Film School (2006-2016).