Through his personal, complex, and intensely imaginative performance works and installations, David Thomson inhabits the intersection of movement, text, sound, and song. His lush, provocative movement scores—balancing transgressive playfulness with both intellectual and physical rigor—have earned him recognition for his fearless interrogation of race, gender, and identity.

Thomson's work investigates and challenges assumptions about presence and absence across multiple arenas, including American history, the Black body, identity, and the dynamics between performer and spectator. Through reconceptualizing the confession booth as a space of self-recognition or proposing a semi-obscured durational performance as a sensorial inquiry of witnessing, he uses deeply personal questions to illuminate broader collective experiences.

Known for his history of collaboration with artists such as Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown, David Roussève, Meg Stuart, Maria Hassabi, Ralph Lemon, Sekou Sundiata, Yanira Castro, Grisha Coleman, Kaneza Schaal, Yvonne Rainer, and Matthew Barney, among others—his work forms a multidimensional thread in the fabric of contemporary performance. His long-standing dedication to community, both as a mentor to emerging artists and as co-founder of the Artist Sustainability Project, is another branch of his fertile and generous creative life.

photo by Ian Douglas