Kirsten Thompson

Kirsten Moana Thompson is Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Film Program at Seattle University. Recent work has focused on the animated surfaces in Moana; the material color history of Disney and Faber Birren; Ludwig Von Drake and the Disney promotional film and Reddy Kilowatt. She is the co-editor of Animation and Advertising (co-ed. M. Cook, Palgrave, 2019), the first book to examine the relationship of animation with non-theatrical media. She has also published Apocalyptic Dread: American Cinema at the Turn of the Millennium (SUNY Press, 2007); Crime Films: Investigating the Scene (Wallflower: 2007), and coedited with Terri Ginsberg, Perspectives on German Cinema (GK Hall: NY, 1996), and is currently working on three other books, Color, Visual Culture and American Cel Animation; Bubbles;  and Animated America: Intermedial Promotion.

Areas of professional expertise: animation, color aesthetics, classical and contemporary American cinema, media archaeology, American studies, Pacific studies, German cinema, New Zealand, visual culture.