Taylor Swift will receive the inaugural Artist-Director award at the MTV Video Music Awards on September 27. The American singer has directed more than 15 of her own music videos.
The network said in a press release that the new honour goes to a musician "whose work behind the camera has expanded the possibilities of music video and advanced the art of visual storytelling."
Swift is currently tied with Beyonce as the most awarded artist in the history of the ceremony, holding 30 awards. She has won Video of the Year five times and is nominated for nine more awards this year, including Video of the Year for "The Fate of Ophelia."
Directing history
Swift began co-directing her videos with Roman White in 2010 for the song "Mine." She has self-directed most of her visual projects since her 2020 single "The Man."
Her first Video of the Year win came for "Bad Blood," which featured a cast including Lena Dunham, Zendaya and Selena Gomez. She won the top prize again for "You Need to Calm Down" in 2019, "All Too Well: The Short Film" in 2022, "Anti-Hero" in 2023, and "Fortnight" in 2024.
Swift told Variety in a 2022 interview that she took on solo directing duties for "The Man" out of necessity.
"I was writing my videos for years and I had a video that was a very specific concept I had written which was that I wanted to be prosthetically turned into a man and live my life as a man and I wanted a female director to direct it and the few that I reached out to were fortunately booked," she said.
The singer said the process became an integral part of her work. "I just thought, 'This is more fulfilling than I ever could imagine,'" she said. "I'm inching my way along taking on more responsibility."
She added that she had always written stories, poetry and songs. "I think this just grew out of a natural extension of that storytelling and I don't think I ever necessarily thought it would be something I would be allowed to do until I actually had enough experience to kind of step out and say, 'I want to do this on my own and see what it's like.'"
Her project "All Too Well: The Short Film" went on to win Best Music Video at the 2023 Grammy Awards. "The more I did it, the more I loved it," Swift said of directing.
Touring and record sales
Swift's music career began after she moved from Pennsylvania to Tennessee with her family. As a child, she had wanted to be a stockbroker like her father. She grew up on a Christmas tree farm, which she references in a holiday song of the same name.
She learned to play the guitar at age 12 from a computer technician and wrote her first song, "Lucky You." In 2010, at age 20, she released the album Speak Now, which she wrote entirely by herself.
That same year, Swift became the youngest solo artist to win the Grammy for Album of the Year for her record Fearless. She made history at the 2024 Grammys by becoming the first female artist to win the prize four times, adding trophies for 1989, Folklore and Midnights.
Her album Lover became the first release of 2019 to sell more than one million pure copies in the United States in its first few months, according to Chart Data. She originally intended to call the album Daylight, but decided it was too obvious following her previous album, reputation.
Swift also surpassed Michael Jackson in 2019 to become the most awarded artist at the American Music Awards.
Her October 2025 album, The Life of a Showgirl, sold 2.7 million copies in its first day, according to the Associated Press. The record sold four million copies in its first week.
Business milestones
Swift reached billionaire status, according to an October 2024 Bloomberg report, driven by her global Eras Tour.
She said in her Disney+ documentary series, The End of an Era, that the tour was created because of the pandemic and the sale of her master recordings. She confirmed in May 2025 that she had obtained the masters for her first six albums.
"That's how I spent that Eras Tour money," she told The Stephen Colbert Show in December. "My fans are why I was able to get my music back."
During the Eras Tour, Swift and her band rehearsed surprise songs quietly so fans gathered outside stadiums could not hear them. She also gave bonuses to her crew at the end of each tour leg.
Personal life
Swift married American football player Travis Kelce earlier this year. She began supporting him at National Football League games in 2023.
"When you say a relationship is public, that means I'm going to see him do what he loves, we're showing up for each other, other people are there and we don't care," she told Time magazine. "The opposite of that is you have to go to an extreme amount of effort to make sure no one knows that you're seeing someone. And we're just proud of each other."
Their August 2025 engagement announcement on Instagram received more than a million reposts, according to Billboard citing Meta data. The engagement also inspired Cambridge Dictionary to name "parasocial" as its 2025 word of the year.
Swift has a number of long-standing celebrity friendships. She has been friends with Selena Gomez since 2008, when Swift spent time with Joe Jonas and Gomez dated his brother Nick.
Gomez supported Swift when she performed the 10-minute version of "All Too Well" on Saturday Night Live in November 2021. Swift has offered to be the flower girl when Gomez marries her fiancé Benny Blanco.
She is also still friends with Abigail Anderson, whom she wrote about in her song "Fifteen", and served as a bridesmaid at her 2017 wedding. Swift is godmother to actor Jaime King's son Leo Thames, and to James, Inez and Betty, the three daughters of Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds.
Early career details
Swift, who is named after musician James Taylor, worked as a model for clothing brand Abercrombie in 2003 alongside Channing Tatum, Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Roberts and Ashton Kutcher.
In 2006, she joined Rascal Flatts on tour after country singer Eric Church was fired. Church told the Arizona Daily Star that Swift called him after reading the news.
"She called and said 'I want you to know that I love what you do,'" Church said. "I joked with her, 'This is your crowd; they're going to love you. You're going to owe me your first gold record.'"
Swift gave Church her first gold record with a note reading: "Thanks for playing too long and too loud on the Flatts tour. I sincerely appreciate it. Taylor."
Swift has stated that she does not have the social media application X on her phone. She told Billboard: "I haven't had Twitter on my phone in a while because I don't like to have too much news. Like, I follow politics, and that's it. But I don't like to follow who has broken up with who, or who wore an interesting pair of shoes. There's only so much bandwidth my brain can really have."
Songwriting influences
She also turns off comments on her social media platforms. In an essay for Elle magazine, she wrote that social media can "inundate your brain with images of what you aren't, how you're failing, or who is in a cooler locale than you at any given moment."
"One thing I do to lessen this weird insecurity laser beam is to turn off comments," she wrote. "Yes, I keep comments off on my posts. That way, I'm showing my friends and fans updates on my life, but I'm training my brain to not need the validation of someone telling me that I look [fire emojis]."
The singer told Rolling Stone in September 2019 that she has never been to therapy. "I talk to my mom a lot, because my mom is the one who's seen everything," she said.
She has said she may never perform her song "Soon You'll Get Better," which deals with her mother's treatment for cancer. "It was hard to write, it's hard to sing," she said during a SiriusXM event in August 2019. "It's hard to listen to for me, but sometimes music is like that."
The 2019 Netflix film Someone Great inspired her to write the song "Death By a Thousand Cuts" with Jack Antonoff. "I cried watching the movie," she told Elvis Duran. "For about a week, I start waking up from dreams that I'm living out that scenario, that that's happening to me."
She traditionally reserves the fifth track on her albums for emotional ballads, such as "The Archer." Swift has stated her favourite lyrics from her Lover album are: "Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand? / With every guitar string scar on my hand / I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover."
The singer is a fan of actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her television show Fleabag. She told Entertainment Weekly: "She makes you crack up, shocks you, and breaks your heart all in the span of a few minutes in that show." Swift performed on Saturday Night Live when Waller-Bridge hosted.
During a 2016 video for Vogue, Swift said her drink of choice is vodka and Diet Coke. She also noted she has double-jointed elbows. Swift wrote her own opening segment, "Monologue Song (La La La)", when she hosted Saturday Night Live in 2009.
