Don Thompson

Thompson attended UCLA Film School, and was mentored by Richard Walter, Chair of UCLA’s screenwriting program.

Thompson’s first major creative success was the anti-war play L.A. Book of the Dead which was first performed at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, Los Angeles, in 1982 (director Renee Tadlock). L.A. Book of the Dead was revived in 1987 by the Rough Theater Company, and continued to be performed as a reader’s theater piece throughout the 1990s.

Since Tibet in Song, Thompson has been affiliated with other notable films as a producer, including Ned Rifle (2015), Railway Children (2016), and Yomeddine (2018). Ned Rifle won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival, and Railway Children was nominated for the 2017 ICFT UNESCO Gandhi Prize for film at the International Film Festival of India. Yomeddine won the François Chalais Prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival where it screened in competition for the Palme d'Or.

Thompson has also developed two plays through the Maryland Ensemble Theater, Democracy: A Work in Progress (2004) and The God of this World (2015). The God of this World was published by Indie Theater Now in 2016 and included in ITN's Plays and Playwrights 2017 anthology.

After 2002, Thompson also became active as an Internet essayist. In collaboration with Michael Neff of WebDelSol Thompson and Neff published two separate anthologies of essays through Del Sol Press, Your Life Is A Movie (2006) and A World Without War (2012).

In 2000, Thompson founded, with partner Diana Takata, the production company nextPix. Notable of the nextPix projects is the Sundance award-winning documentary Tibet in Song, directed by former political prisoner of conscience Ngawang Choephel. Thompson was a producer on the film.

In 1999, Thompson produced, directed and wrote his first feature film, Clouds, based on a screenplay he developed while at UCLA. The film won awards, including Best New Director at the Brooklyn Film Festival, a Feature Film award at the New York Independent Film Festival, and Juror’s Choice for Narrative Feature at the Brooklyn Arts Council Film and Video Festival. William Arntz was a producer on the project, and also a co-producer of Thompson’s play, Tibet Does Not Exist.

In 1995, his play Tibet Does Not Exist was first performed at the Gene Frankel theater in New York City and later, Off-Broadway (1997) by the Theater for Human Rights. The play was also performed at Oregon Stage Works in 2005 and revived at Nicu’s Spoon Theater in New York City in 2009. The play was published in paperback in 1998 with a foreword by Robert Thurman and the Dalai Lama.