Discipline: Theatre – playwriting

Lisa B. Thompson

Discipline: Theatre – playwriting
Region: Austin, TX
MacDowell Fellowships: 2021

Lisa B. Thompson’s plays include Single Black Female; Underground; Monroe; The Mamalogues; and Dinner. Her work has been supported by the Vortex, Millay Colony for the Arts, Austin Playhouse, W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center, New Professional Theatre, Hedgebrook, ScriptWorks, Crossroads Theatre, the National Performance Network, Fusebox Festival, and MacDowell among others. She has received several awards including the Irma P. Hall Black Theatre Best Play Award, The Austin Critics Circle David Mark Cohen New Play Award, and a Broadway World Regional Award for Best Writing of an Original Work. Thompson is Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and affiliate faculty in English, Theatre & Dance, and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Thompson is the author of Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class and numerous articles.

While at MacDowell, she worked on a performance art piece entitled The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body, which premiered at the 2024 Fusebox Festival. Thompson recently received a Spring 2021 National Performance Network Creation & Development Fund award, as well as funding from Black Art Matters ATX.

Portrait by Ricardo Brazzieli

Studios

Garland

Lisa B. Thompson worked in the Garland studio.

Marian MacDowell and friends originally named this studio in memory of Anna Baetz, the nurse who helped care for Edward MacDowell in the waning years of his life. With generous support from the Garland family, the studio was renovated in 2013 and renamed the Peter and Mary Garland Studio. The inward opening, diamond-pane windows were replaced…

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