About Adam

Adam J. Thompson is the recipient of the 2023 USITT and Live Design Rising Star Award, recognizing early career excellence, innovation, and artistic achievement in the field of design.

In January 2024, he was appointed Resident Projection Designer at Palm Beach Dramaworks.

Adam is an award winning creative director, creative producer, and multimedia designer working in theatre, opera, cinema, television, installation, events, and digital narratives, and he is the Founding Artistic Director of The Deconstructive Theatre Project, a not-for-profit multimedia storytelling and arts education studio which he founded and led from 2006 - 2016.

Adam’s work as a multimedia performance director and as a video, projection, and media designer has been produced and presented off-Broadway, off off-Broadway, regionally, and on tour with companies and at venues that include New York Theatre Workshop, The Public Theater, Atlantic Theatre Company, Theatre for a New Audience, La Mama, Ars Nova, HERE, The Flea, American Theatre Wing, Terminal 5, Beth Morrison Projects, National Sawdust, New York University, Boston Lyric Opera, El Paso Opera, City Theatre, and Diversionary Theatre, as well as in collaboration with a wide variety of major corporate entities including Delta, Ford, Salesforce, and Uber. He is an alumni of The Public Theater’s Devised Theatre Working Group and the HERE Artist Residency Program and has collaborated with the multimedia performance collectives Big Art Group and The Builders Association. Adam and his work are the recipients of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, The Jerome Robbins Foundation, and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and he was an invited ambassador to and exhibitor at the 2018 Beijing International Design Biennial.

Adam’s practice includes a strong interest in the creative development pipeline, live cinema, multimedia interactive and responsive design environments, public history and public placemaking, and digital historic preservation. He served as an Adjunct Instructor and continues to guest lecture in Video & Media Design at Carnegie Mellon University, and has previously taught and lectured at the University of North Carolina, New York University, and Fairleigh Dickinson University. He holds a BA in directing and dramaturgy from Emerson College, an MFA in Video & Media Design from Carnegie Mellon University, and he is currently pursuing an MA in Museum Studies from the City University of New York.

Adam’s work has been called “a multimedia fantasia” (Time Out New York) and praised for “masterfully…illuminating the utter complexity and subjectivity of our own consciousness” (ArtLab), and for being “so purposeful, unique, [and] innovatively reflective on the future of the performing arts” (Letters from the Mezzanine).

Adam is an amateur historian, a collector of rare ephemera and books, an Alfred Hitchcock aficionado, a murder mystery connoisseur, an avid baker, and an urban explorer.

He is a member of USITT and IATSE United Scenic Artists Local 829.