About

About Me :

Leah Thompson is a documentary filmmaker, producer, and writer, living in Los Angeles, California. Her work is particularly interested in how creative communities, both historical and contemporary, foster and advocate for social and environmental change. Her short documentary, How to Start Your Own Utopia, follows prominent Chinese artist Ou Ning and his ill-fated rural reconstruction effort in remote Anhui province. The film premiered at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2017 as part of the exhibition, Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World, and was included in subsequent exhibitions at the Guggenheim Bilbao and SFMOMA.

Leah is also the producer of COAL + ICE, a large-scale photography and video exhibition about climate change, co-curated by Susan Meiselas and Jeroen de Vries. COAL + ICE is a project of Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations, where Leah served as Associate Director from 2011-2015. After exhibitions across China and at the official residence of the U.S. Ambassador to France during COP21 in Paris, COAL + ICE made its U.S. premiere in San Francisco at the Fort Mason Center for Art and Culture in September 2018 in conjunction with Governor Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit.

Leah’s writing, photography, and videos have been featured in The New York Times, ChinaFile, NPR, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic, among others. Her videos have been shown in galleries and museums across the world.

She holds a BA and MA in American History from UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University, respectively, with a focus on American cultural and intellectual history. She is Co-Principal of Two Tigers Productions.

leahvivi [at] twotigers [dot] co