Dr. Cheryl Thompson is Director, Black Creative Lab and Creative Lead, MobaPojects. She is also Associate Professor, Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University. Dr. Thompson is the author of Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty (2021) and Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture (2019). Dr. Thompson's third book, Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Plantation Slavery in the Age of Theatrical (Re)Production, 1604-1895, is anticipated in 2024; Wilfrid Laurier Press. Her first edited collection, Creative Industries in Canada (Canadian Scholars Press), co-edited with Dr. Miranda Campbell, was published in 2022. Dr. Thompson is the recipient of multiple Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grants. The first, funded through an Insight Development Grant (2019-22), has produced an open-source resource website that will launch in 2022, and a YouTube Channel comprised of educational videos that help to explain the complex history of blackface, the emergence of the North American theatre, and the sociocultural politics of race, mimicry and mass entertainment from the 19th century through today. The second, funded through a Connection Grant (2020-22), is in collaboration with Toronto-based film company Pink Moon Studio. Together, we are co-producing a feature documentary film on Canadian blackface set for release in 2024.In 2021, Dr. Thompson was a recipient of an Ontario Early Researcher Award (2021-26) titled, “Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives Through Storytelling,” this project aims to catalogue Ontario’s Black archival collections, and through ethnographic interviews with the province’s creative community (dancers, choreographers, museum curators, visual and performing artists), we will, over a five-year period, collect stories about how Black archives have been used as storytelling vehicles.In 2021, Dr. Thompson was named to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.