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Richard Thompson is a 3D artist/generalist, associate professor, and coordinator of digital design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). He has over 35 years of creative and collaborative arts industry experience on award-winning projects. 

The last two decades have been focused specifically on bringing virtual characters to life, visual storytelling through animation, environmental narrative, and optimized immersive game world design. He was awarded an Excellence in Teaching Award. In industry, he worked on the History Channel’s Engineering an Empire as a 3D generalist, as an animator and 3D designer in the production pipeline for Word World, a multi-EMMY Award-winning TV series, and in modeling, texturing, and rendering television commercials and product visualizations for Chobani yogurt and pharmaceutical companies. 

In an earlier career as an actor and playwright, he appeared on and off-Broadway in Tony and Obie award-winning plays; he was nominated for a Helen Hayes Best Actor Award for the role of Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Thompson, whose own plays have won Drama-Logue awards, is working on an animated short film, “La Piazza,” in which a gelato salesman battles for survival against the forces of change. For it, he is designing and producing related media, such as 3D printed character figurines and a VR experience.