Nato Thompson is an author, curator, and what he describes as a “cultural infrastructure builder.” He has worked as the Artistic Director at Philadelphia Contemporary and Creative Time, and as a Curator at MASS MoCA. He is currently the founder of The Alternative Art School, an online art school that began after the summer of 2020. Thompson organized major Creative Time projects including The Creative Time Summit (2009–2015), Pedro Reyes’ DOOMocracy (2016), Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), Living as Form (2011), Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures (2012), Paul Ramírez Jonas’s Key to the City (2010), Jeremy Deller’s It is What it is(2009, with New Museum curators Laura Hoptman and Amy Mackie), Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008), and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007), among others. He has written two books of cultural criticism, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (2015) and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life (2017). 

Nato Thompson is the seventh guest in the 2021-22 Master of Visual Studies (MVS) Proseminar. This year’s series is led and programmed by Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan.