Luke Willis Thompson (born 1988) is a New Zealand artist of Fijian and European descent, currently working primarily in film.

He completed a BFA (2009) and MFA (2010) at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, and studied at the Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt am Main, in 2013–2014.

[15] In 2012, a large-scale sculptural ready-made work by Thompson, Untitled (2012) was included in a group exhibition titled Between Memory and Trace at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts in Pakuranga, Auckland.

[19] When the work was shown later that year at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, the gallery said: This cemetery contains the graves of colonial migrant labourers from India, China, and elsewhere in Asia, who were indentured to sugarcane plantations.

Indigenous people are buried in the central section—including the artist’s own grandmother—while migrant labourers are interred at the bottom in an area which floods heavily.

Sucu Mate/Born Dead brings attention to the complicated historical interrelationships between cultures in the Pacific region, and highlights broader histories of exploitation central to colonisation.

Commissioned by the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, the work was completed when Thompson was artist in residence at Chisenhale Gallery.

'Graeme' is the son of Joy Gardner, a 40-year-old Jamaican mature student living as an undocumented migrant in London who died after police raided her home intending to deport her in 1983.

[22] In an interview with Thompson for The Guardian about the work, Hettie Judah wrote: “Diamond,” says the artist, “needed to be interpolated into cinematic history – the history of cinema owes black life something.” Autoportrait is intended as a counter to the cameraphone footage Reynolds broadcast on Facebook – which was, and continues to be, widely shared.

The exhibition, titled Luke Willis Thompson, features three film works: Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries, Autoportrait and a new commission How Long?