Geoff Thompson has been drawing or photographing small creatures most of his life. He learned scientific insect illustration “on the job” in 1975, as a research assistant at University of Queensland. He has worked at Queensland Museum for 40 years, 30 years in entomology and since 2012, as a collection imager. His illustrations and photographs have appeared in many books, journals, posters, displays and websites. In 2018 a selection of his photographs was printed up to three-metres across for the Queensland Museum and some were projected on the William Jolly Bridge, Brisbane Australia.
Geoff won a 2005 Queensland-Smithsonian Fellowship to study digital illustration and imaging systems; spending 15 weeks mostly at the Systematic Entomology Laboratories, USDA, within the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC.
He served as president of the Entomological Society of Queensland in 2012 and was Chair of the Organising Committee of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators’ Annual Conference and Exhibit, Brisbane, 2019. This was only their second conference outside the USA in 51 years.
In 2015 Geoff was awarded a highly commended in the Eureka Science Photography Award. He has won several Australian Institute of Medical and Biological Illustration (AIMBI) Awards, including two gold awards and best overall entry at their conference in 2018.
Since 2016 Geoff has collaborated with artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso on three major projects, photographing peacock spiders.
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