Lisa B. Thompson is an Austin based theatre artist and scholar whose critically acclaimed plays and innovative scholarship explore issues of race, class, sexuality and gender. Her plays have been performed across the US and Canada and have been produced and/or developed by New Professional Theatre, Brava Theater Center, Theatre Rhinoceros, New African Grove Theatre Company, Black Spectrum Theatre, Company of Angels Theater, FronteraFest, the Actors Warehouse, The One-Minute Play Festival, ScriptsWorks and the National Black Theatre Festival. Thompson’s off-Broadway two-woman show, Single Black Female (Samuel French, 2012), a nominee for the 2004 LA Weekly Theatre Award for best comedy, uses rapid-fire comic vignettes to examine the love lives of thirty-something African American middle class women. The San Francisco native’s other full-length plays include the one-woman show Dreadtime Stories: One Sista’s Hair; Monroe; The Mamalogues; and Underground. Thompson is also the author of several short plays including I Don’t Want to Be, Black Lives Matter: Three Words, Legacy, Second Grade, Night. Her satirical comedy Mother’s Day, the first installment of her Afro-futurist trilogy of short plays, was featured in the 2013 anthology show, Black Women: State of The Union and voted one of the best of FronteraFest 2013. Watch, the second installment in her Afro-futurist trilogy, premiered in Carry On, the Scriptworks Out of Ink Festival in April 2016.
Thompson is also Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and affiliate faculty in the departments of English, Women and Gender Studies and Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her BA in English and MA in African American Studies from UCLA and her Ph.D. from Stanford University Program in Modern Thought and Literature. The centerpiece of her scholarship is her first book, Beyond The Black Lady: Sexuality And The New African American Middle Class (University of Illinois Press, 2009). Her creative work has been published in Contemporary Plays by African American Women: Ten Complete Works (University of Illinois Press, 2015) and Catch The Fire: A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (Riverhead Books, 1998). She has lectured widely across the US on topics such as African American theatre, black film and representations of black middle class womanhood. While serving as the Associate Director of the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at UT Austin from 2013-2015 Thompson curated its Performing Blackness Series also initiated #BlackArtMatters, in which she engaged in public conversations about the role of politics in contemporary art with visiting performing artists.
Thompson’s work has been supported with fellowships and awards from a number of institutions, including Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts, the University of California’s Office of the President, Michele R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, UCLA’s Center for African American Studies, the Five Colleges Inc., and Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Thompson is currently completing “Black Millennial Stages: Reimagining History, Memory and Identity,” a study about the ways contemporary African American playwrights engage with notions of history.
