Welcome to Natasha Thomsen's Web Site
CV/BIO
CV/résumé (updated 8/07/08)
Bio:
Natasha lived in New York City during the 1960s, then moved to Virginia when she was 8 to live in a "new town" project called Reston. She attended a professional dance academy in Washington, DC for 3 years, a career that ended with 27 performances of Nutcracker as a candy cane and a court lady. Her family's move to France opened a new chapter when she attended high school at the Lycee International in St. Germain-en-Laye and found herself majoring in French philosophy, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Dylan lyrics. Her thesis addressed racial inequality through literature ("On the Road To Sambo") and she discovered her passion for theater while studying Waiting for Godot, playing the maid in Blythe Spirits, and studying for the baccalaureate certificate in theater history.
She returned to the States in 1978 to study drama, dance, and literature at Bennington College in Vermont. While she was working on her thesis on French cinema ("Le Cinema Intimiste"), she met her future husband. After graduating from Bennington, she wrote and directed a screen adaptation of C. B. Brown's Wieland, an American gothic tale. The film was shot on location in her sister-in-law's 15th century French castle.
After a brief stint teaching English and exporting European short and long films to the burgeoning American cable television market, she returned to New York City to study interactive media with Red Burns at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in a new department, The Interactive Telecommunications Program.
While at NYU, she interned at Bellevue Hospital where she videotaped AIDS patients--before the disease was well understood--in 1983. She also interned at United Nations Television as a researcher for a project on war and peace and to work in the television studio. Her thesis work was an interactive video project to provide coping techniques for families of learning disabled children. The program combined a VCR with a personal computer, then an emerging concept, to simulate dyslexia.
After 1986, Natasha went on to work in market research, records management, and medical publishing, where she honed her technical writing and reporting skills. In addition to freelance writing, she became a landlady, imported French antiques for a few years, and began conducting personal growth workshops for women and the general public as part of her own spiritual research.
Her fascination with the human story and natural mysteries took on theatrical and literary form with Reunion Cafe and On Hallow's Eve, her first one-act plays, which were publicly performed in a staged reading by the Playreaders Theatre of Waterbury in Connecticut in 1995 and 1997, respectively. The latter personified the author's intrigue with the power of masks and their effects on human behavior. She has been struggling to move past these achievements ever since. In 2006, she returned to the theater to stage manage and generally work behind the scenes and reconnect with the heartbeat of the theater process.
Her work has been published in the Mystic River Press, Westchester County Times, Fairfield County Times, The Antique Trader, Antique Week, Cotton & Quail, The Freelancer, Ships N' Scale, The Journal of the National Medical Association, as well as in corporate, medical, consumer, and trade publications and web sites. She authored a reference book, Global Issues: Women's Rights, for Facts on File (New York City) that was published in July 2007.
Natasha is currently living part-time in Westchester County, New York and part-time in Tennessee. She's working on several plays and still questing for knowledge in many domains, from writing for children, how to really edit, to finding out more about life, death, and all that.
She's also trying to bring to an end a 40-year-old family drama surrounding an apartment in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Stay tuned for the next chapter.
This document is maintained by nmthomsen@aol.com.
© 2002-2006; last updated and rewritten 8/07/08