Lisa B. Thompson is an award winning artist, scholar, and Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Theatre & Dance and English at the University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarship focuses on black feminist theory, performance, theatre, film, television, black cultural studies, literature, and issues of gender and racial representation in contemporary culture.

Thompson has written five plays, including "Single Black Female" (Theatre Rhinoceros; LA Weekly Theatre Award for Best Comedy nominee, Black Theater Alliance Award nominee, Irma P. Hall Black Theatre Award Best Play nominee), "Underground" (The Vortex; Austin Critics Circle David Mark Cohen New Play Award winner, Broadway World Regional Awards Best Writing of an Original Work Nominee), "Monroe" (Austin Playhouse; Austin Playhouse Festival of New Texas Plays winner), "The Mamalogues" (The Vortex; Broadway World Regional Awards Best Writing of an Original Work winner), and "Dinner" (Crossroads Theatre Company’s Genesis Festival of New Plays). Thompson's publications include "Beyond The Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class" (University of Illinois Press, 2009), which received Honorable Mention in competition for the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize from the National Women's Studies Association, Single Black Female (Samuel French Inc. 2012), and Underground, Monroe, and The Mamalogues: Three Plays (Northwestern University Press, 2020).


Her scholarship also appears in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Finding A Way Home: A Critical Assessment Of Walter Mosley's Fiction (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances (Wayne State University Press, 2011), The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (Routledge, 2018), and Are You Entertained? New Essays on Black Popular Culture in the 21st Century (Duke University Press, 2020). She has received fellowships and residencies from a number of institutions including the American Council of Learned Societies, W. E. B. DuBois Research Institute; the University of California's Office of the President; the Michele R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research; UCLA's Center for African American Studies; the Five Colleges Consortium; the University of Texas at Austin's College of Liberal Arts; Stanford University's Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity; the MacDowell Colony; Hedgebrook; and the Millay Colony for the Arts.