The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body

Lisa B. Thompson
Presented in partnership with Texas Performing Arts + The Vortex

Lisa B. Thompson is a playwright, scholar and the Patton Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is also affiliate faculty in English, Theatre and Dance and Women and Gender Studies. Her scholarship focuses on Black feminist theory, theatre, film, Black popular culture and literature. Through her residency, she will develop her latest project The Black Feminist Guide to the Human Body—a meditation on the experience of aging as a Black woman in the U.S. Part performance art, health fair, and group research project, this piece explores Black women’s health disparities and the toll that reality takes on the psyche. 

Thompson’s substantial oeuvre includes award-winning plays: Single Black Female (LA Weekly Theatre Award for Best Comedy nominee); Monroe (winner of the Austin Playhouse Festival of New Texas Plays); The Mamalogues (winner of the Broadway World Regional Awards Best Writing of an Original Work); Underground (winner of the Austin Critics Circle David Mark Cohen New Play Award); and Dinner (Ashland New Play Festival Semi-finalist). Her books include Beyond The Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class (2009), Single Black Female (2012), and more. Thompson’s work has received support from several institutions including the American Council of Learned Societies, the W. E. B. DuBois Research Institute at Harvard University, the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Stanford’s Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity, among others.