Jul 22, 2022

Tessa Thompson Graces Cover of Harper's BAZAAR's August Issue

Introducing The Cover of Harper's BAZAAR's August Issue, Tessa Thompson

Thompson loves New York. She spent her childhood going back and forth between Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and her birthplace of Los Angeles. She comes back to the city often. “It suits my personality better than the isolation of Los Angeles,” she says. “There’s that kind of serendipity” about New York: You might run into a friend or catch a show. (Thompson, a professed “Pamela Anderson enthusiast,” recently saw Chicago, with Anderson in the role of Roxie, as well as Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize– and Tony Award–winning A Strange Loop, which she calls “undeniably fantastic”; she also has plans to see the Deana Lawson show at MoMA PS1 with a friend, the musician Dev Hynes.)

"My dream with something like Luster is to be able to allow audiences to discover a young Black woman in all of her beauty and brilliance and messiness."

— Tessa Thompson

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Writer: Lauren Michele Jackson

Lauren Michele Jackson is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of the essay collection White Negroes and is currently working on a second book, with Amistad Press. She is part of New America’s 2022 class of National Fellows.

Photographer: Collier Schorr

Collier Schorr was born in New York City in 1963 and attended the School of the Visual Arts, New York. Best known for her portraits of adolescent men and women, Schorr’s pictures often blend photographic realism with elements of fiction and youthful fantasy.