About Me :
Leah Thompson is a documentary filmmaker, producer, and writer, living in Los Angeles, California. She recently completed How to Start Your Own Utopia, a short documentary following Ou Ning, a prominent Chinese artist, and his ill-fated counter-urbanization effort in Bishan village. How to Start Your Own Utopia 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 will be on display at SFMOMA beginning in November 2018.
Leah is also the producer of COAL + ICE, a large-scale photography and video exhibition about climate change, which premiered at Three Shadows Photography and Art Centre in Beijing in 2011. After exhibitions in Shanghai and the 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.
Her writing, photography, and videos have been featured in ChinaFile, The New York Times, NPR, Foreign Policy, South China Morning Post, and City Lab, and translated into Chinese for The New York Times (Chinese edition), and The News Lens. 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, and was born and raised in Redding, California.
Bishan village, Anhui province, China. Photo by Matjaž Tančič.