Thompson, Ayanna: - Ayanna Thompson is Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) and Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author of Blackface (2020), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars (2018), Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach (2016), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (2011), and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (2008). She wrote the new introduction for the revised Arden3 Othello (2016), and is the editor of Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (2010) and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (2006). She was the 2018-19 President of the Shakespeare Association of America, and served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Marshall Scholars. She was one of Phi Beta Kappa's Visiting Scholars for 2017-2018. She has conceived and organized large-scale interdisciplinary conferences like RaceB4Race.