Professor Ayanna Thompson FBA

Summary

Ayanna Thompson is a Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, and the Executive Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). In 2021, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Thompson is the author of numerous books, of Blackface (Bloomsbury, 2021), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars (Arden Bloomsbury, 2018), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach, co-authored with Laura Turchi (Arden Bloomsbury, 2016), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2008). She wrote the new introduction for the revised Arden3 Othello (Arden, 2016), and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (Palgrave, 2010), and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (Routledge, 2006). She is currently collaborating with Curtis Perry on the Arden4 edition of Titus Andronicus.

Thompson is known for her public-facing work with theater companies. In this capacity, she works as a Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at The Public Theater in New York and has been the dramaturg for the Broadway productions of Macbeth, Uncle Vanya, and Romeo + Juliet.

She currently serves on the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Parks Arts Foundation, and Play On Shakespeare, and previously served on the boards of the Association of Marshall Scholars and Woolly Mammoth Theatre. She is a past-President of the Shakespeare Association of America.