Dan Thompson was born in Alexandria, Virginia, and graduated from the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. He earned his M.F.A. from the Graduate School of Figurative Art of the New York Academy of Art, and supplemented his training with several years of private study and studio apprenticeships along the east coast of the United States.

He has been awarded two grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and has twice received the Ethel Lorraine Bernstein Memorial Award for Excellence in Painting from the Corcoran College of Art and Design. In 2001, he won Best of Show in the American Society of Portrait Artist’s International Portrait Competition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In 2006, Mr. Thompson co-founded the Grand Central Academy of Art in New York. He has also instructed privately at Studio 126 in New York and taught at Parsons, the New School for Design and the New York Academy of Art. He has taught workshops in Seattle, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and in Italy and France. Since 2003, he has demonstrated portrait and figure drawing and served as a juror and board member for the Portrait Society of Canada’s International Portrait Conference in Toronto. He has also lectured at the Dahesh Museum of Art in New York and served as a speaker at Studio Incamminati’s Advanced Portrait Workshop and Symposium in Philadelphia.

Mr. Thompson’s work can be found in public and private collections throughout the United States, and in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East.